Mobilising Housing Histories-Learning from London's Past for a Sustainable Future [1 ed.] 9781859466315, 9780429346149, 9781000702347, 9781000702118, 9781000701883

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LEARNING FROM LONDON'S PAST EDITED BY PETER GUILLERY AND DAVID KROLL

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES

© RIBA Publishing, 2017 Published by RIBA Publishing, 66 Portland Place, London, W1B 1AD ISBN 978-1-85946-631-5 The rights of Peter Guillery and David Kroll to be identified as the Editors of this Work have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 sections 77 and 78. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the copyright owner. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Commissioning Editor: Elizabeth Webster Design and production: Michèle Woodger Printed and bound by WG Baird Ltd Cover image: The London County Council’s Morris Walk Estate in Woolwich, under construction in 1964 using the Larsen-Nielsen prefabrication system, also showing speculatively built Victorian houses beyond, on Woodland Terrace and Maryon Road. While every effort has been made to check the accuracy and quality of the information given in this publication, neither the Authors nor the Publisher accept any responsibility for the subsequent use of this information, for any errors or omissions that it may contain, or for any misunderstandings arising from it.

LEARNING FROM LONDON'S PAST EDITED BY PETER GUILLERY AND DAVID KROLL

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many people have contributed in many ways to this book. First and foremost, of course, are the individual authors who have in some cases separately acknowledged help received in their endnotes. The editors and publishers would like particularly to thank a few whose contributions have been more general. Professor Matthew Davies and Olwen Myhill at the Institute of Historical Research were instrumental in bringing about and hosting the June 2013 conference from which this book arises. At the Bartlett School of Architecture in University College London, the Bartlett Faculty Vice-Dean of Research Professor Murray Fraser, Luis Rego and Mark Burgess have been supportive. UCL’s Urban Laboratory was also an influential partner. Professor Andrew Saint, General Editor of the Survey of London, has been a long-term source of wisdom for both editors. His contribution to this book extends well beyond his foreword. Helen Jones, also at the Survey of London, has almost effortlessly produced all the book’s drawings, and Joanna Smith at Historic England has read drafts and made helpful comments. Christine Wagg not only advised on text but also generously facilitated Peabody sponsorship.

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ABOUT THE SPONSORS The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL The Bartlett School of Architecture is part of The Bartlett, University College London’s Faculty of the Built Environment. It was established in 1841 and is UCL’s world-leading centre for education and research in architecture. It has been voted the best school of architecture in the UK in the AJ100 survey of practices by The Architects’ Journal for 13 years in a row, and 2016 saw the school ranked second in the world in the international QS World University rankings for Architecture and the Built Environment. Located in the heart of London, the School of Architecture is at the forefront of international research and teaching, encompassing interdisciplinary collaboration and methodologies. Bartlett students are amongst the most sought-after in the UK and Europe for their outstanding drive, creativity and skills. With around 800 students, 40% of whom represent more than 45 nations, and more than 220 staff of diverse backgrounds, The Bartlett is widely known as one of the most influential, exciting and innovative architecture schools in the world. Ten per cent of students are doctoral candidates. Over the past 20 years they have received more RIBA medals than any other school. Many have gone on to occupy leading roles in established practices worldwide; many others have set up award-winning businesses of their own. Recent examples include Asif Khan, Bio-Bean, Bombass & Parr, Duggan Morris, Factory Fifteen, HUT, Moxon, Threefold and WeMadeThat. www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/architecture Institute of Historical Research The Institute of Historical Research (IHR) is one of nine member institutes of the School of Advanced Study, part of the University of London. Founded in 1921 by AF Pollard, the Institute of Historical Research is an important resource and meeting place for researchers from all over the world. Its mission is to: •

promote the study of history and an appreciation of the importance of the past among academics and the general public, in the UK and internationally, and to provide institutional support and individual leadership for this broad historical community

•

offer a wide range of services, both onsite and remotely, which promote and facilitate excellence in historical research, teaching and scholarship in the UK, by means of its library, seminars, conferences, fellowships, training, consultancy, Continuing Professional Development and publications (both electronic and in printed form)

•

provide an accessible and stimulating portal for the exchange of ideas and information and current developments in historical scholarship

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produce internationally regarded scholarship from our academic staff and research centres.

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Peabody Peabody was established in 1862 by the American banker and philanthropist George Peabody. Its mission is ‘to make London a city of opportunity for all by ensuring that as many people as possible have a good home, a real sense of purpose and a strong feeling of belonging’. It works solely in London, with a presence in the majority of London boroughs, owning and managing around 28,000 homes and providing affordable housing for over 80,000 people. This is set to grow with 8,000 new homes planned across the capital, meaning Peabody will provide a good home for one in every 100 Londoners. Every penny that is generated from sales on the open market is reinvested into providing more affordable homes and building thriving communities – expanding George Peabody’s founding mission to more people than ever before. As well as bricks and mortar, Peabody provides community programmes for the benefit of its residents and for people living in the surrounding neighbourhoods, including employment and training support, health and wellbeing projects, family support programmes, welfare benefits advice, and activities for younger and older people. It supports over 23,000 hours of free-toaccess community activities each year. This work aims to tackle poverty at its roots, supporting people to transform their lives and communities for the better.

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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS Ben Campkin is the author of Remaking London: Decline and Regeneration in Urban Culture (IB Tauris, 2013), which received the 2015 Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Foundation Book Award and a commendation in the 2013 RIBA President’s Awards for Research. He is co-editor of Dirt: New Geographies of Cleanliness and Contamination (IB Tauris, 2007/2012), Engaged Urbanism: Cities and Methodologies (IB Tauris, 2016), Sexuality and Gender at Home: Experience, Politics, Transgression (Bloomsbury, 2017) and the series Urban Pamphleteer (2013–). Campkin is Senior Lecturer in Architectural History and Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, and Director of UCL’s Urban Laboratory. Irina Davidovici is a post-doctoral researcher at the gta Institute’s Chair for the History of Urban Design in ETH Zurich. Born in Bucharest, she qualified as an architect in London and worked with Caruso St John and Herzog & de Meuron between 1998 and 2002. She completed her doctorate at the University of Cambridge in 2008 and until 2012 taught history and theory of architecture at Kingston University. Her research bridges the practice, teaching, and critical interpretation of architecture, and has been published in numerous books and journals including OASE, AA Files and Casabella. Davidovici is the author of Forms of Practice: German-Swiss Architecture 1980–2000 (gta Verlag, 2012), editor of Colquhounery: Alan Colquhoun from Bricolage to Myth (AA Publications, 2015) and recipient of the RIBA President’s Research Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis 2009. Richard Dennis is Emeritus Professor of Geography at UCL, where he has taught courses on ‘Cities and Modernity’ and ‘London: A Geographical Introduction’, and is a major contributor to Ramble London (www.ucl.ac.uk/ramble-london), a series of guided walks through the capital. He is currently researching apartment housing in London and Canadian cities, and public transport in Victorian and Edwardian London. His book, Cities in Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2008), focused on streets, buildings and infrastructure in London, New York and Toronto, 1840–1930. He is on the editorial committee of The London Journal, in which he has also published papers on London’s earliest ‘high-rise’ flats, Queen Anne’s Mansions, and on the early history of the Underground. As an enthusiastic ‘Literary Londoner’ he has written extensively about the novelist George Gissing in late Victorian London. He is preparing a co-edited book on Architectures of Hurry (Routledge, forthcoming). Peter Guillery is a Senior Research Associate for the Survey of London, the leading reference work on the history and architecture of England’s capital city, now produced from UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture. Since 1986 he has contributed to volumes on Poplar, Blackwall and the Isle of Dogs, Clerkenwell, Marylebone and, as editor, Woolwich. He is now leading work on Whitechapel, where research is being co-ordinated through a participative website (surveyoflondon.org). His investigation of South Acton came at the end of a spell away from the Survey spent recording threatened buildings across London. He is also the author of The Small House in Eighteenth-Century London (Yale University Press, 2004) and the editor of Built from Below: British Architecture and the Vernacular (Routledge, 2011). vii

Owen Hatherley was born in Southampton, England, in 1981. He received a PhD in 2011 from Birkbeck College, London for a thesis on Constructivism and Americanism, published in 2016 as The Chaplin Machine (Pluto Press). He writes regularly for The Architects’ Journal, Architectural Review, Dezeen, The Guardian, The London Review of Books and The New Humanist, and is the author of several books: Militant Modernism (Zero, 2009), A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (Verso, 2010), Uncommon: An Essay on Pulp (Zero, 2011), Across the Plaza (Strelka, 2012), A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys through Urban Britain (Verso, 2012), Landscapes of Communism (Penguin, 2015) and The Ministry of Nostalgia (Verso, 2016). He also edited and introduced an updated edition of Ian Nairn’s Nairn’s Towns (Notting Hill Editions, 2013), and wrote texts for the exhibition Brutalust: Celebrating Post-War Southampton, at the K6 Gallery, Southampton. He lives in Woolwich. Tanis Hinchcliffe taught architectural history for many years in the School of Architecture at London’s University of Westminster. She has researched many aspects of the history of architecture and urbanism, especially domestic building in France and England. She has a longstanding interest in the production of suburban developments in Islington, public housing policy and production, and post-war gentrification. She is the author of North Oxford (Yale University Press, 1992) and (with John Bold) Discovering London’s Buildings (Frances Lincoln, 2009), as well as many articles in collections and journals. Simon Hudspith studied at Newcastle University and won the RIBA Bronze medal as an undergraduate. He then gained a Harkness Fellowship and continued his education at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and at the University of Pennsylvania where he won the Samuel Huckel Architecture Prize. He gained professional experience at the Terry Farrell Partnership, Venturi Rauch & Scott Brown and ORMS, prior to setting up Panter Hudspith Architects in 1988. He was the partner in charge of the Collection in Lincoln, Christ’s Lane in Cambridge, Princesshay in Exeter and Davygate in York, which have won a combined total of 19 awards including three RIBA, three Civic Trust, one AIA and 12 construction awards. Simon also oversaw the completion of one of the blocks in the Athletes’ Village for the 2012 Olympics, and Royal Road, an award winning affordable housing project in Southwark. David Kroll is Lecturer in Architecture at the University of South Australia and has a background in professional practice, academic teaching and research. Born in Berlin, he qualified and practiced as an architect in London, which became the formative ground for his research passion. During work in architectural practice, he was involved in a number of housing projects including the Athletes’ Village for C.F. Møller Architects. His PhD thesis, completed at the Institute of Historical Research, London, focuses on the history of speculative housing in London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was supervised in collaboration with the Survey of London and shortlisted for the RIBA President’s Research Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis 2015. He held previous lecturing positions at the University of East London, Anglia Ruskin University and the University of Kent. In 2015 he relocated to Australia, where he teaches architecture and researches housing-related topics, exploring historical and theoretical perspectives, as well as contemporary issues and technologies. Sofie Pelsmakers is a chartered architect and environmental designer with over15 years’ experience designing, building and teaching sustainable architecture, including deep retrofit. viii

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS She is co-founder of Architecture for Change, a not-for-profit environmental building organisation, head of research at ECD Architects and lecturer at the Sheffield School of Architecture where she co-leads an MSc in Sustainability. She completed her doctoral research in building energy demand reduction at the UCL Energy Institute, where she investigated the heat loss of pre-1919 un-insulated suspended timber ground floors and heat loss reduction potential of interventions. She is author of The Environmental Design Pocketbook (RIBA Publishing, 2012), which synthesises her practical and academic expertise to support the building industry towards a significant change in its design and building practices. It received commendation for the RIBA President’s Awards for Outstanding Practice Based Research 2012. Simon Pepper is Emeritus Professor of Architecture at Liverpool University. He trained at the AA and wrote his PhD under Joseph Rykwert on Renaissance Italian military architecture. He has worked in private practice, in a housing policy division of the Department of the Environment, and at the British School in Rome, the University of Virginia and the University of Minnesota. His books include Housing Improvement: Goals and Strategy (Lund Humphries, 1971), (with Nicholas Adams) Firearms and Fortifications: Military Architecture and Siege Warfare in Sixteenth Century Siena (University of Chicago Press, 1986), and (with Alistair Black and Kaye Bagshaw) Books, Buildings and Social Engineering: Early Public Libraries in Britain from Past to Present (Routledge, 2009). David Roberts is Architectural History and Theory Tutor and Research Ethics Fellow at the Bartlett School of Architecture. Alongside his work at UCL, he is part of collaborative art practice Fugitive Images and of architecture collective Involve. He uses poetry and performance to explore the relation between people and place. He has exhibited, lectured and published work related to public housing, architecture, critical methodologies and site-specific practice. His PhD thesis in architectural design, ‘Make Public: Performing public housing in regenerating east London’, explored the history and future of two east London housing estates undergoing regeneration: the Haggerston Estate, a 1935–8 London County Council neo-Georgian perimeter block demolished in 2014; and Balfron Tower, a 1965–7 Brutalist high-rise designed by Ernő Goldfinger facing refurbishment and privatisation in 2016. A version of his chapter for this book has won a RIBA President’s Award for Research 2016. Andrew Saint works part-time for the Survey of London, of which he was the General Editor between 2006 and 2015. He has written a number of books including Richard Norman Shaw (1976 and 2010), The Image of the Architect (1983), Towards A Social Architecture: The Role of England in Post-War School-Building (1987), and Architect and Engineer: A Study in Sibling Rivalry (2007), all published by Yale University Press. Between 1995 and 2006 he was a professor in the Department of Architecture at Cambridge. Colin Thom is a Senior Research Associate for the Survey of London. A Fine Art graduate of the University of Glasgow, Colin worked in the archive of London Transport Museum before joining the Survey, whose volumes he has contributed to since 1994. He recently edited the landmark 50th volume, Battersea: Houses and Housing (Yale University Press, 2013). He is also the author of Researching London’s Houses: An Archives Guide (Historical Publications, 2005).

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CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

IV

ABOUT THE SPONSORS

V

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

VII

FOREWORD OWEN HATHERLEY

XIII

PREFACE ANDREW SAINT

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INTRODUCTION DAVID KROLL

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HISTORICAL OVERVIEW PETER GUILLERY

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1. URBAN DESIGN IN VICTORIAN LONDON: THE MINET ESTATE IN LAMBETH C.1870 TO 1910 DAVID KROLL

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2. ‘MILES OF SILLY LITTLE DIRTY HOUSES’: THE LESSONS OF VICTORIAN BATTERSEA COLIN THOM

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3. RENEWABLE PRINCIPLES IN HENRY ASTLEY DARBISHIRE’S PEABODY ESTATES, 1864 TO 1885 IRINA DAVIDOVICI

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4. RESIDENTIAL FLATS: DENSIFICATION IN VICTORIAN AND EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY LONDON RICHARD DENNIS

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5. SOUTH ACTON UNSUSTAINED PETER GUILLERY

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6. GENTRIFICATION: THE CASE OF CANONBURY, 1850 TO 1975 TANIS HINCHCLIFFE

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7. HIGH-RISE HOUSING IN LONDON, C.1940 TO C.1970 SIMON PEPPER 8. ‘WE FELT MAGNIFICENT BEING UP THERE’: ERNŐ GOLDFINGER’S BALFRON TOWER AND THE CAMPAIGN TO KEEP IT PUBLIC DAVID ROBERTS 9. OUT-OF-SYNC ESTATES BEN CAMPKIN 10. RECENT APPROACHES TO THE SUSTAINABLE RETROFIT OF VICTORIAN HOUSES SOFIE PELSMAKERS AND DAVID KROLL

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141 163

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11. LESSONS OF THE PAST FOR MY ARCHITECTURAL PRACTICE SIMON HUDSPITH

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REFERENCES

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FOREWORD OWEN HATHERLEY Every Londoner has their own particular housing history, and it’s probably a complex one. Unless you’re one of the lucky people at either the top, with a house owned outright, or at the bottom, with one of the increasingly stringently means-tested council flats, you’ve probably been transient, moved from place to place, from flat to flat; in many cases, you’ll have moved further and further out from Zones 1 and 2 with every year, and not because of a preference for the outer parts of London. A lot of Londoners will have managed to live in many of the typologies discussed in this book – Victorian speculative houses, Peabody charitable tenements, Arts and Crafts semis, post-war council maisonettes whether architect-designed or standardised, Halls of Residence or ‘stunning riverside developments’, to name just some. What ‘housing’ analyses often leave out is the side-effects of housing: bedsits, subdivided houses, and – the newer typologies of contemporary London – the garages, ‘beds in sheds’ and the like. But to precede those histories, here’s mine, which I think is reasonably typical. Like most ‘Londoners’, I wasn’t born here, but moved to the city at the age of 18, to study at a peripheral college of the University of London. The first place I lived was a Hall of Residence in New Cross, SE14. Halls of Residence have been a hugely successful type over the last 15 years, as developers like Unite and Nido have capitalised on the expansion in numbers and abdication of provision that happened after the introduction of tuition fees. This being 1999, it was somewhat more prosaic a 1960s brick box attached via a passageway to a large Victorian house. Rooms were small, containing a basin, a desk, bookshelves and a bed, with around 25 residents per floor sharing one very large kitchen and several toilets. Between the two buildings was a Victorian orangery and, curiously, a piano room. Rent was £55 a week (today, the average Unite room costs the equivalent of around five times that). It was surrounded with Victorian housing of a fairly high quality, rangy villas and Italianate terraces, and had a view of what was, at that point, the single tower of Canary Wharf. My first actual rented accommodation was in what seems to be one of the major types for Londoners of any age – the subdivided flat above a shop, or in this case, a flat above a shop and the entryway to an MOT depot. Walls were paper-thin, as was the floor, meaning that the room shook every time a car went beneath, which was often. Rubbish left outside before council collections was moved by the owner of the depot to a huge, festering pile, so that it didn’t get in the way of the cars. I’m fairly happy to say this is the only place I’ve ever lived that has been demolished. This was followed with the only move I made further into the centre rather than further east: to Loughborough Junction, in the un-named interzone between Brixton and Camberwell. The flat was in the sort of early nineteenth-century terrace – stucco, brick and order – that usually sells for enormous sums of money, but at this point was reasonably cheap, presumably due to the fact that there was no central heating, just ill-smelling gas heaters in each bedroom. The rent was cheap even for the time, with a single street block owned by a strange Withnail & I-like office nearby, staffed by chain-smoking, paunchy types in an office littered with papers on worn wooden furniture. You could go months without paying the rent before they would notice. xiii

All these were brief stays. Afterwards I lived in Deptford, from 2003 to 2007, alternately studying for a Masters degree and signing on at the JobCentre, some years before it became ‘Job Centre’, a hipster cafe and bar. Deptford is echt London, littered with strange pointers to its history, ‘authentic’ and wildly faked. There was high architecture if you knew where to look – on the post-industrial wastes of Deptford Creek, Herzog & de Meuron’s Laban Centre rehoused the dance school that has been here for decades in a surprising and appropriate long and low building clad in a drizzly frosted glass; further south along the river Ravensbourne, David Adjaye’s Stephen Lawrence Centre was, aptly, more harsh, with brutal volumes, a sharp steel screen and defensive gating protecting it from tiny, square and already gentrifying early Victorian terraced houses. On the riverside, the large London County Council (LCC) tenement blocks, with their long access decks, washing lines and grand archways felt almost Hanseatic, organised around extraordinary churches like Archer’s icy, English baroque St Paul’s or the freakish St Nicholas, with its pirate-ship skull and crossbones gateposts. The High Street, then as now almost devoid of both dereliction and chain stores, gives way to a side street with a junk market; the Albany Theatre, a typically mock-organic c.980 vernacular design with a parodically rustic spreading red-tiled roof; and some similarly restrained and traditional terraces designed when Nicholas Taylor was at the helm of housing in Lewisham in the 1970s. Naturally, I ascribe the fact that this is the only street in London where I’ve ever been mugged to the effects of their traditional design. Circa 2000, new developments in Deptford turned their back on this dense and odd area, creating instead new spaces – first some closes of introverted semis around cul-de-sacs, then a development of tall, gated flats around a hilarious, Russian-designed statue of one-time resident Peter the Great, Tsar of all the Russias. Only a decade after this did the Big Bang come, with several new complexes of luxury flats, often claiming to be in Greenwich, the other side of the Creek. Some RBS-sponsored abstract volumes grew around the Laban Centre, clumsily approximating its drizzly glass; by the Stephen Lawrence Centre rose OneSE8, a gross and heavily gated development of flimsy tenements and towers. In both cases, it was hard not to assume that Herzog & de Meuron and Adjaye’s original, cranky public buildings had become unwitting Trojan horses for private property development. In Greenwich itself, half-a-dozen new towers rose on the site of a demolished 1960s LCC estate, all with their percentages of ‘affordable’ housing but with few if any social tenants. Along Resolution Way, this drew closer and closer to Deptford High Street and the housing estates, until council tenants and residents of the likes of OneSE8 were walking the exact same streets, shopping in the same supermarkets. The council flats themselves, when they were bought, could easily be sold to the sort of young professionals to whom OneSE8 was marketed – perhaps more easily, given that these flats were more handsome, better built, and often more spacious. It is at the nearby Pepys Estate where Deptford’s housing complexities become almost obscene. A once highly praised LCC estate combining three tower blocks, several jaggedly articulated maisonette blocks and a few rehabilitated Georgian buildings, it was ‘regenerated’ in the early 2000s through selective demolition, the building of new speculative and Housing Association blocks on the allegedly ‘useless’ open spaces of the estate, and the total clearance of the riverside by Aragon Tower, which was refurbished and opened to private tenants at silly money for a one-bedroom flat. At the time, I was living on the High Street in a bedsit, paying out to a private landlord for a rodent-infested room (the skirting boards had been chewed straight through and xiv

FOREWORD OWEN HATHERLEY all along), and sharing with, at one time or another, two security guards, two dance students, a small Polish family, a Slovak security guard, a German-Nigerian couple and a Liverpudlian pensioner; the bedsit had what the latter called ‘the smallest kitchen in Christendom’ and a single tiny bathroom, not easy given that I have an unpleasant gastroenterological condition. Naturally, I applied for a council tenancy. The local Housing Office was on the Pepys Estate. At the interview, the officer told me that if it was their choice, I’d get on the priority list, but rules were rules, and I could expect it to be nearly ten years before a flat would be available. As I looked up at the reclad, decanted, regenerated and socially cleansed Aragon Tower, it was hard not to think ‘No shit’. Instead, I moved into another shared flat above a shop, this one in Greenwich and this time with people I actually knew. It says something about them that it was quite an enjoyable experience, given the staggering awfulness of the flat. My room had a slit-like window which never wholly closed and was almost hidden at the back of a built-in, open wardrobe. The bathroom featured a steep slope, and a ceiling crawling with mould and attendant creatures. At one point, the landlord constructed an extension on top of our flat. Builders crashed through the ceiling one morning, in Looney Tunes fashion. So oddly enough, the best place I’ve ever lived in London is where I live now: a council flat in SE18, although rented not from the council, but at several removes from the person who bought it in Right to Buy. Woolwich is, in the parlance, ‘up and coming’ – particularly as it has such a huge amount of public land, currently used for public housing, ready to be re-classified as ‘brownfield’. This has already happened with the Connaught Estate, and is on the way for Morris Walk, the LCC’s flagship experiment in system-building (see this book’s cover). I suspect my estate is fairly safe, but as I look out of my window, I can see cranes constructing sober brick-clad tenements for developers, and green spaces just itching to be built on. Soon enough, it’ll be an area of ‘high value’, and the council will be legally pressured to sell the land. The place will look much the same – some of the council flats are even listable, and the Twentieth Century Society might get interested – but it will have been finally transformed. In all of this, the absence from my life, and from that of most Londoners, of the sort of housing that once defined London – publicly owned, with controlled rents – is so obvious it hardly even seems worth commenting upon. London is ‘housed’ today by landlords and estate agents, and the public actors who make up much of this book are going, going...

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PREFACE ANDREW SAINT This book is full of good things and new things about London’s housing history. Over and above that, it tries to learn from that history and argues for applying its ‘lessons’ to London’s present housing predicament. It provokes some simple questions: but what are those lessons? Is urban housing a topic whose history is more or less pertinent to the present than others, such as urban transport? More fundamentally, is it ever possible to learn meaningfully from history? To take the last question first, it’s surely a peculiarity of modern Western life to assume that history is a sealed book belonging only to the past. No pre-twentieth-century society ever supposed that its existence was anything but a continuum, and that its future direction did not depend upon guidance or even a positive measure of inevitable compulsion from past example. We all instinctively know why those ideas no longer command general conscious agreement; so fast has change taken place that not only the material circumstances but the mindsets of our predecessors now seem unimaginably remote. As human beings we continue instinctively to be mimetic, creatures of habit, by and large for reasons of our safety and survival. But the precedents we draw on nowadays are fairly immediate ones. For our sense of direction we rely on things we have experienced in our own lifetimes, plus the infinite resources of information we can all now access about the contemporary world around us. In order to operate effectively, we have little need to tap into the wisdom of the dead past, as we used to when access to knowledge and guidance was more limited. History, in the sense of the relevance or truth of our predecessors’ ideas, is indeed bunk. That is why, as economic and social change quickens, it becomes ever harder to get our leaders and experts to believe that the past of anything can suggest solutions or even clues, positive or negative, to future policy. The housing debate or question is a case in point. Naturally, it never goes away. The years since Thatcher’s government have been no exception, from the polemics of Richard Rogers and his allies, to the prolonged handwringing about Britain’s inability to produce enough housing, especially for London, where the population is estimated to be increasing by some 50,000 a year. But this debate, as I understand it, has ceased in any meaningful way to refer to past housing, whether in terms of politics or form or location or management. The only reference one tends to find to the past is the refrain that ‘they got it wrong’ – unilluminating and often untrue. Despite all that, material history remains inescapable for all of us who live in old countries and old towns. Most people’s relationship with the past is one of necessary co-existence: whether born there or having moved there, we have to deal with habitats originating from long before we came on the scene. Following the famous Churchillian dictum ‘we shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us’, they become part of our character and background. We are trapped by them. Confronted by the materiality of an increasingly alien past, some of us tear down and open up interiors, slap in plastic windows and slosh white on every surface. Others cherish every mantelpiece and mousehole, and pick paint out of ceiling roses or even concrete mullions. But xvii

whatever our reaction, positive or negative, history is stronger than us because buildings and places tend to last longer than we do. We are obliged to adapt them, just as they adapt us. Even pulling them down completely does not solve the problem, as the destroyers of slums always find. The new buildings soon become as problematic and oppressive as the old, and themselves quickly age. So tenacious is housing as the most basic among the multiple human demands for shelter, that it often takes over more specialised building forms. And so, strangely, while we hear so much about the desperate deficiencies of London’s housing supply, more and more of its buildings are converted into housing: warehouses, pubs, banks, churches, even offices, so that some parts of inner London are losing their variety and becoming more mono-cultural as a result. Given that compulsory relationship with housing history, why not turn it to advantage? Why not mobilise it? Here begin the difficulties. To be aware of the material past and respect it is easy, to adapt it is possible and ecologically prudent – but to put it to exemplary present and future use is far more formidable. Take, for instance, the question of production. The prodigious Victorian ability to turn out acre after acre of ‘silly little dirty houses’, to borrow the title of Colin Thom’s essay, depended on a model of social and economic organisation now completely irrecoverable, involving leasehold tenure, low ground rents, a large artisan labouring class to do the building, and very basic services for the original occupiers. We might wish to replicate the level of production and even the building-type, but we certainly wouldn’t wish to revert to the whole package. In any case that wouldn’t be possible. Urban housing is a commodity, and its production has always been rooted in the prevailing economic organisation of society at any given time. Though fringe experiments are always possible, any housing reform en gros not based on the nature of current demand and supply could not work. But while it may be fantasy to suppose that an understanding of housing history can lead to a fundamental change in production, it has other uses. For a start, it can supply the sociological understanding over time so sorely needed when housing is planned, going beyond the superficial survey of immediate market requirements. Many of the essays in this book deal with the fate of housing types, estates or whole areas over decades of changing circumstances, and convey their striking and often unappreciated adaptability. Every London housing type, including the tower block now, has been through the cycle of popularity, denigration and rehabilitation. Housing history shows that few dwellings and places are unadaptable; it is always worth tending what it is there and seeing how it can be improved, hardly ever worth pulling down and starting from scratch. The lessons of economy and social experience coincide with those of ecology, perhaps because they are ultimately the same. But that more intelligent approach has to be based on a longer-term understanding. It is still too seldom applied. History of course operates at other than fully functional or conscious levels. Recently I wrote a revisionist piece about the West London suburb of Bedford Park, famous as a manifestation of the so-called Queen Anne Revival. The Queen Anne style at Bedford Park went beyond architectural fashion, I argued; it embodied an allusion to the vision of Englishness and English history articulated in the 19th century by TB Macaulay, whereby the national struggle for freedom and unity saw its first expression in the Battle of Turnham Green on the site of Bedford Park, and came to a climax with the Glorious Revolution and Marlborough’s victories over the French in the reign xviii

PREFACE ANDREW SAINT of Queen Anne. Who did I suppose had that kind of conscious idea in mind? Neither the promoter of Bedford Park, Jonathan Carr, nor its sundry architects, nor the fashionable young aesthetic couples who flocked to live there around 1880 seemed plausible. Nevertheless the historical connection was lurking somewhere in the background of the culture of the time – as Moncure Conway, the first commentator on Bedford Park, was percipient enough to notice. Rightly or wrongly, we do not care to refer to historical styles in architecture these days, for the kinds of reasons set out above. But that does not mean that history has ceased to be embodied in our housing, in ways which future historians will be able to articulate more clearly than we can ourselves.

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INTRODUCTION DAVID KROLL Urban populations continue to increase in most regions of the world, often outpacing the provision of adequate housing.1 London, as a growing metropolis, is in the middle of a severe housing crisis, widely evident in the press and in political debate. This crisis is caused and exacerbated by a combination of factors: increase in population and number of households; dependency on a market that fails to meet demand; planning restrictions on urban expansion; rising rents and house prices driven up by low supply; the credit boom and foreign investment; inequalities in access to housing; a decline of the affordable housing stock; and the reinforcement of the general trend to exclude lower-to-middle-income households from living in central areas. Housing affects all aspects of our lives, weighing on living standards and economic growth, particularly in expanding, dense urban areas such as London.2 Those in greatest need, such as young and low-income families, are often unable to afford adequate housing.3 The difficulty of supplying adequate homes for growing demand is not new. Histories of housing have long dealt with topics that preoccupy debates today – general social concerns, regeneration, densification, gentrification, control of development, building heights, dwelling types, space standards and the all-encompassing but also elusive topic of sustainability. What drives this publication is the idea that these histories should be more explicitly mobilised to offer new perspectives on present debates and to influence these by offering lessons from the past. For example, measured by longevity, sustained popularity, liveability, average densities and productivity, the Victorian period provides numerous good precedents and ideas – something picked up in several of the book’s chapters. No other publication so directly aims to apply lessons from such examples to current issues. The book does not provide solutions, but rather affords glimpses into aspects of how similar problems to those faced now were dealt with in the past. The idea for the publication grew out of a similarly titled conference held in June 2013, Mobilising London’s Housing Histories: The Provision of Homes Since 1850, hosted by the Institute of Historical Research. This conference, attended by over 100 delegates, was still oversubscribed, no doubt due to the currency of the issue. Most of the book’s contents arise from this conference – however, with an eye to evenness and coherence, all of the chapters were specifically written for this book, and this is not a ‘proceedings’ volume. The book’s authors, all involved in different ways in the study or production of housing, are a mix of established experts, practitioners and newer researchers. Together they present fresh perspectives on topics as diverse as urban design, retrofit, gentrification, speculative and public housing. In-depth studies of aspects of the past – focused on particular themes, periods or cases – are presented in distinct chapters in roughly chronological order, but with some overlaps. Some chapters focus on a particular time period (e.g. Victorian/Edwardian or post-Second World War). Other essays without dates in the title either cover more or less the whole period of 1850 to today, or are focused on the history of a particular case study (e.g. the Balfron Tower) or theme (e.g. the ‘sink estate’). 1

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES These pieces of a larger puzzle link to wider historical contexts and offer the reader more detailed insights than would be possible in a historical overview. There has been no attempt to impose uniformity: the book is a collection of engaged and authoritative but disparate views, united only in taking knowledge of the past and attempting to apply it to present circumstances. To repeat, the aim is not to try to provide solutions to today’s problems, but to explain and re-evaluate past examples, which often reveal surprising parallels. With this book, we aim to inspire those interested in housing – and involved in contributing towards solutions to the crisis – with deeper historical understandings. At the heart of the present housing question is an affordability crisis, decades in the making and reflected in recent housing statistics. London has the highest proportion of working people who claim housing benefit in the country. The average house price in 2014 in London was £526,085 – 16 times mean annual earnings. The income required for an 80% mortgage at 3.5 times annual incomes would be £120,248 per annum. Rental costs are just as much affected by price inflation; average monthly private sector rents in 2013–14 were £1,461, and since 2014 these costs have gone up even further.4 While rental and purchase costs of housing have increased significantly over recent decades, incomes have increased only slightly.5 Commenting on 2014 London housing figures, Jonn Elledge, editor of CityMetric, expressed what many are thinking: ‘it’s hard to avoid the feeling that something, somewhere, has gone terribly wrong’.6 The causes of the affordability crisis are complex and have been subject to much recent discussion and analysis. One way of framing the issue is around factors affecting demand and supply. On the demand side, a key factor is London’s rising population (approximately an extra one million people annually between 2001 and 2011).7 This is driven by high net birth rates (c.80,000 per year) and net immigration (c.20,000 per year), which is linked to London’s success in creating new jobs. Demand for property sales, however, has been dominated by investors (e.g. buy-to-let) rather than by new owner-occupiers in recent years.8 Revelations of the extent of overseas investment for tax avoidance, particularly in ‘prime central’, make this imbalance in the market even more controversial.9 Successive UK governments have promoted and supported property ownership over other forms of tenure; properties in London, however, are now out of the reach of most first-time buyers, unless they have help from family, and the traditional model of the ‘property ladder’ that supported the ideal of a property-owning democracy seems broken. For the first time in decades, renters outnumber homeowners in London, with often very little security of tenure.10 The alternative to homeownership, the rental market, has also become increasingly unaffordable. An average income earner on an annual pre-tax salary of £32,838 (about £2,000 a month after tax) would not have much left after paying the average rent of £1,461.11 Families in rental accommodation therefore often need to rely not only on double incomes, but also on other support; about 50% of those in private rental are benefit claimants, contributing to a housing benefit bill in 2012–13 of about £6 billion. In fact, the total bill for housing benefit over the last ten years (c.£50 billion) is significantly higher than the amount of public money that has gone towards building new homes (c.£17 billion).12 Those who cannot afford private rental accommodation can apply for government-supported social rented housing. This, however, is no longer as affordable as it once was. In 2011, the government introduced a new ‘affordable rent’ 2

INTRODUCTION DAVID KROLL model, which allows Housing Associations to set the rent at 80% of local market rates. Previously, social rented housing was set at around 50% of local market rates.13 On the supply side, one restriction has been the availability of land suitable for building homes. A study commissioned by the Greater London Authority (GLA) estimates that suitable sites are available in London to build 42,000 homes a year over the next decade.14 The actual annual average number of new homes built over the last decade, however, is only about 25,000. Even if 42,000 homes a year were realised, this would still fall short of projected needs of 49–63,000 homes, so land availability does need to be considered. In established residential areas, new development is generally restricted, to varying degrees, by planning rules that aim to maintain scale and character.15 Such positive limitations, however, also mean that finding space for new house-building is a challenge in much of London. A more proactive and predictable London-wide urban planning approach to densities and acceptable building heights has therefore been suggested as one of the ways to increase house-building activity.16 The Lyons Housing Review concurs by proposing to ‘de-risk’ the planning process, suggesting that more suitable land should be identified and delivered for building through Local Plans.17 Under current planning laws, the Green Belt restricts the kind of expansion in overall area that supported London’s house-building booms up to the early twentieth century.18 It is interesting to note in this regard that until that time, planning approval processes also carried much lower risks of refusal, as urban design codes were significantly simpler.19 Supply of finance has always been an important factor for house-building productivity. In the immediate post-war period, house building in the UK was largely publicly funded, with councils providing on average over 160,000 homes per year between 1945 and 1975, of which around 20,000 were in Greater London.20 Since housing development by local authorities came to be restricted in the early 1980s, most new housing has been constructed through private enterprise. Yet annual completion rates by private-sector house builders have been on a steady decline since their peak in the 1960s of near 200,000; in 2013, UK-wide completions stood at only about 87,000 homes, significantly short of the projected need of 200,000.21 Housing associations, supported by public funding, have also provided a significant share of new housing in recent decades – about 18,800 new homes per year between 1978 and 2013.22 Smaller house-builders are particularly affected by problems of access to finance. Until the early twentieth century, small builders were responsible for most new house-building, even though they did not have access to lending from banks or building societies.23 The Victorian housebuilding industry thrived in part due to a low financial entry threshold thanks to leasehold development (see Chapters One and Two). It should also be noted that philanthropic developers made an important contribution (see also Chapter Three). In the 1980s smaller building firms still contributed over 57% of new housing; in 2013 their share had fallen to only 27%.24 There is now growing interest in reviving this kind of house-building through government policies and initiatives such as localism, self-build and custom-build.25 These hard economic facts around supply and demand are, however, only part of the explanation of London’s current housing crisis. There are also less tangible reasons why it has taken so long for 3

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES the problem to be taken seriously and why it has been allowed to escalate to such an extent. In the early 2000s rising UK property prices – euphemistically described as a ‘housing boom’ (in fact house price inflation) – were still seen as positive by many and often presented as a sign of a healthy economy.26 Estate agents, banks and others profited from a property market flooded with easy credit. The loudest voices were those that talked about profits from rising property values, rather than about an affordability crisis in the making. Some, however, questioned the economic benefit of the emperor’s new clothes. In 2002 David Walker commented: ‘As prices push on up, what harm is there in partying? The answer is that speculation is economic distraction, distortion, fiddling with redistributing a body of assets – not adding to it. Our successive housing bubbles add to social inequality and express our fiscal immaturity’.27 Today, the social costs of the ‘party’ have become painfully apparent. House prices have moved beyond the reach of most people on average incomes in London.28 It is now obvious that the assumption that rising house prices are a sign of a healthy economy and therefore necessary is flawed. The current affordability crisis in London suggests that high house prices have not in fact increased wealth for society as a whole – a classic economic fallacy of confusing rising monetary values with an actual increase in material wealth. Even if some may have gained financially, rising prices in London have increased social inequality and have resulted in housing costs taking up a higher proportion of incomes (as rent or mortgage payments) – therefore making the average Londoner effectively poorer, rather than richer.29 Yet, even as we begin to experience the farreaching socio-economic effects of rising housing costs, it remains questionable that there is sufficient political will and support to allow prices to adjust, which is ultimately the only way for housing to become more affordable again. Daniel Bentley aptly called this the elephant in the room: ‘very many people do not want housing costs – or, more precisely, the price of their own home – to fall at all. Most homeowners (which still, for now, means most households) have gained and continue to gain from rapid house price growth’.30 While the causes of the crisis and appropriate solutions are complex and disputed, most would agree that more housing – and housing that is more affordable (not merely labelled as such) – is needed to accommodate growth in population and household formation. Politicians in recent years have promised to address the problem, but affordability and overcrowding have become worse rather than better. The questions are: What kind of housing is needed? And how to go about providing it?31 Housing has a crucial role in contributing to quality of life and wellbeing. These are therefore ultimately also questions of the kind of place that London will be in the future. Affordable housing should not be confused with building cheaply, which would have little impact on house prices; construction costs have only been a minor factor in the escalation of housing costs over recent decades.32 Part of the challenge is therefore to take a long-term and holistic view of affordability, which also means making London’s housing more energy-efficient and sustainable. What role, then, does history have in contributing to this discussion and answering these questions? It would be wrong to suggest that history can provide easy answers, and this publication makes no such claim. However, history can offer new perspectives to help us see current issues in new lights. In a field as complex as housing, history is a most instructive testing ground. This book provides original historical case studies focused on lessons from past 4

INTRODUCTION DAVID KROLL successes and failures, treating London as an exemplar with global relevance. The aim is to explore issues relating to the history of urban or suburban housing from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, with particular emphasis on liveability, sustainability, affordability and productivity. While lessons from past precedents are not directly translatable into the future, they can inform it. Irina Davidovici and Richard Dennis present specific examples regarding different kinds of residential blocks. Housing history can remind us of the pitfalls of misapprehension suffered by our predecessors. Examples are obsessions with building high or with the perceived failures of Victorian or post-war social housing, recently and yet again vilified by politicians33 – issues discussed in different ways by Colin Thom, Peter Guillery, Simon Pepper, David Roberts and Ben Campkin. History can also help to explain the processes that have led to the present and dispel myths; Tanis Hinchcliffe’s chapter, for example, shows that gentrification, far from being a recent phenomenon, has a long history in London – and that an area of seemingly established affluence has undergone varied and unexpected transformations. Even fairly recent topics already have histories, which can inform the way they are approached in the future; examples can be found in Campkin’s chapter on the concept of the ‘sink estate’, as well as in Sofie Pelsmakers and David Kroll’s chapter on recent approaches to the sustainable retrofit of Victorian houses. Finally, an example of the practical application of lessons from history can be found in Simon Hudspith’s essay, in which he describes how buildings of the past have influenced his own design practice. Each chapter takes its own idiosyncratic lessons and perspectives from the study of London’s past. They do not supply clear answers or instructions, but they do all provide valuable insights. On the question of the role of history more generally, John Tosh has eloquently expressed what this book aims to deliver in relation to London’s housing: ‘If society looks to historians for “answers” in the sense of firm predictions and unequivocal generalization, it will be disappointed. What will emerge from the pursuit of “relevance” is something less tangible but in the long run more valuable – a surer sense of the possibilities latent in our present condition.’34 Rather than generalisations, the chapters explore particular themes through the history of a building, a number of different buildings or an area – bringing out the complexities involved and breaking through superficial perceptions. Care has been taken to ensure that the chapters cover a range of relevant issues, and the chapter structure also follows a chronological logic. However, no attempt has been made to align the perspectives of the different authors from an ideological or political point of view; the reader will therefore find that the authors approach these issues from different angles, which do not always align. This heterogeneous collection of points of view is part of the intention and quality of this publication. This approach would be compromised by any attempt at an overarching summary. The chapters mobilise London’s past from varied perspectives, commenting on design, social, economic and policy issues, and underlining the key lesson that solutions to the crisis need to address all these concerns. We hope that these in-depth perspectives can provide insights and inspiration to others interested in housing, particularly those who play a role in contributing directly towards solutions to the crisis, such as planners, politicians, activists, journalists or architects. Since the housing crisis is not only a London issue but also a global problem – with many similarities in other metropolitan regions – the book should also be of interest to those studying housing crises in other cities around the world. 5

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HISTORICAL OVERVIEW PETER GUILLERY The essays in this book investigate aspects of London’s recent history from 1850 to the present day, a period during which the city’s physical boundaries were much extended to accommodate massive population increase. London was already Europe’s biggest city (and among the world’s largest) in 1800 when its population was around one million. That had doubled by 1850 to make London the most populous city the world had known. The next half century saw a trebling, before further growth to a high around eight million in the 1930s. There was then gentle decline through the later twentieth century. That has turned back, for the figure to rise again to more than eight million by 2011. Here it must be remembered that the definition of London’s area was much enlarged in 1965; densities in the inner boroughs are now much lower than they were in the 1930s. Further population increase to above ten million by 2036 is anticipated.1 The extraordinary rate of growth in the first half of the period examined here generated huge housing demand that was, perhaps inevitably, inadequately met. War and greater expectations in a more democratic society caused different pressures in the second half of the period; a difficult post-war housing crisis took 30 years to ease, even against the backdrop of an essentially static population. For a situation analogous to the present, with a grave housing shortage and rising population, it is necessary to look back to the nineteenth century. Campaigners then struggled with the seeming intractability of poor housing of which there are many famous representations. At the beginning of the Victorian period, Charles Dickens described, in Oliver Twist, the living conditions of Jacob’s Island in Bermondsey – ‘rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter’.2 George Godwin, appointed editor of The Builder in 1844 when it was a new publication, established a readership and influence in large part through his insistence on housing reform. He helped expose overcrowding and other terrible deficiencies, and gathered a decade’s experience of the subject in a book, London Shadows: A Glance at the ‘Homes’ of the Thousands (1854). Despite widespread recognition of the problem, and significant public health improvements, there was a strong disinclination to interfere with the housing market on the part of those with power to do so. Change was painfully slow and completely incommensurate to the population pressures. Another 30 years on, in 1884, Godwin was appointed to the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes, established amid a crescendo of shame and anger about chronically appalling housing conditions. Legislation followed, but small steps forward always met resistance. Godwin died in 1888, not quite living to see the emergence of council housing. Reform takes time. To step back: what was new in Victorian London was the scale of the problem and the outcry, rather than the existence of poor housing. Housing problems, crises even, were certainly not new to London in 1850. In this introductory context it is worth focusing on the history of attempts to solve London’s housing problems, more than on the history of housing tout court, and travelling back from the 1850 threshold to set the scene with a longer view.3 Inchoate growth, poor construction, high rents and inadequate supply went back many centuries. From 1580 to 1657, legislation attempted to constrain suburban building and, where developments were approved, 7

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES to encourage the use of brick rather than timber, to reduce fire risks.4 But these interventions were limited in effect. Indeed, the possibility that unlicensed buildings would be cleared tended to encourage low-grade development. Efforts to prevent growth set alongside immigration exacerbated housing shortages and overcrowding. John Stow, author of the first Survey of London, looked back with tired nostalgia in 1598, bemoaning London’s growth out through Whitechapel, ‘both the sides of the streete bee pestered with Cottages and Allies’.5 In Clerkenwell people lived in reconfigured pigsties. As if decades of war and visitations of plague were not supplementary complications enough, at a stroke in 1666 fire destroyed about 13,000 houses in the City and areas to its west – about a quarter of the capital’s housing stock. Recovery was rapid, though not as orderly or newfangled as enlightened commentators like John Evelyn and Christopher Wren proposed. Beyond the area burnt, there was much other necessary replacement, as well as growth. In the 1690s about 70% of the houses in London’s northern and eastern suburbs were only 30 or fewer years old;6 leases of that length or shorter were usual, and, like today, new buildings were not expected to last much longer than a generation. Elsewhere, at what were then the margins, better capitalisation of leasehold development did bring regularity and well-built housing, particularly in the West End where large aristocratic landholdings facilitated building for the better off; there, long leases (99 years) became the norm. Even so, speculative builders often had to settle for less opulent occupants (and therefore lower rents) than those to whom they aspired, and for the subdivision of houses of forms, often in terraces, that were eminently suited to this kind of adaptation. Speculation was a risky but cannily flexible each-way bet accommodating what would now be called custom-build. Many small operators succeeded, benefiting from the bridge provided by peppercorn rents during construction; many others failed. It would be misleading to suggest that Georgian London’s dwellings were all houses. As in other European cities of the time, there were plenty of buildings designed for, as well as used for, multiple occupancy, and only linguistic evolution or mythologisation can account for ‘tenements’ being a word not associated with London. Purpose-built industrial tenements – what might now be termed live/work units – characterised the generally poor silk-weaving district around Spitalfields, and there were many designedly divided houses in other working suburbs. Westward shifts of affluence left erstwhile desirable places, for example the late seventeenthcentury brick houses of the area around Seven Dials in St Giles in the Fields, to decline and multiple occupancy. Courts and alleys proliferated, especially east and south, and timber building was not effectively checked until after the London Building Act of 1774 which introduced rates in order to charge fees to pay for enforcement through district surveyors – that had nothing to do with housing reform. John Gwynn, a comprehensive redeveloper and gentrifier of his time, thought the capital was ‘disgraced with despicable cottages’. His recipe for housing the poor articulates naked elite justification for mixed tenure: ‘In settling a plan of large streets for the dwellings of the rich, it will be found necessary to allot smaller spaces contiguous, for the habitations of useful and laborious people, whose dependence on their superiors requires such a distribution; and by adhering to this principle a political advantage will result to the nation; as this intercourse stimulates their industry, improves the morals by example, and prevents any 8

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW PETER GUILLERY particular part from being the habitation of the indigent alone, to the great detriment of private property’.7 The ‘improvement’ advocated by the likes of Gwynn was, then as now (read regeneration), generally to the great disadvantage of the displaced poorest. People learned to be wary of the word and its outcomes. In the war years around 1800 a credit squeeze, inflation, shifts in favour of contractors at the expense of tradesmen and the industrialisation of supply all combined to entrench greater standardised commodification in housing development, and brought a decline in standards.8 Deliberately short-life and shabby housing, run up by all manner of mean and minor profiteering speculators, was rife. Intensive development produced what came to be labelled ‘slums’. The first recorded use of the word to mean poor housing dates from 1825: ‘back slums lying in the rear of Broad St’ (in Soho).9 The emergence of a sense of collective or at least top-down social responsibility for London’s housing can, for convenience, be pinned to 1844 – not just for Godwin’s appointment, nor for the Metropolitan Building Act of that year which imposed the beginnings of drainage control (though little else of a reformist nature), nor even for the writing of Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England, which described the slums of St Giles and Bethnal Green (though it does serve as a reminder that the housing ‘question’ was always in large measure about the avoidance of revolution). In the same spirit – and for present purposes more significant – was the transformation that year of what had been the Labourer’s Friend Society into the Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes, to focus on housing, with Prince Albert as its president. Philanthropic in nature, the Society made a stumbling start with a court of cottage flats before, in 1850, putting up a five-storey block of ‘Model Houses for Families’ that is still extant as Parnell House on Streatham Street in Bloomsbury. By then there was also the more commercially minded Metropolitan Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrious Classes, but these initiatives were not big enough to build on a large scale. Finance was the main impediment. The founding of the well-endowed Peabody Trust in 1862 was an important further marker in the emergence and effectiveness of philanthropic housing. Many large blocks of flats ensued, a story whose enduring legacy is taken up in Irina Davidovici’s chapter in this book. A year later Sydney Waterlow set up the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company, a commercial operation that promised 5% profits on its numerous developments of blocks of model dwellings. Its standard type was copied by the Corporation of the City of London at Corporation Buildings on Farringdon Road of 1864–5; this six-storey block technically constituted the country’s first ‘council’ housing. That was a false dawn. To make projects profitable, higher densities were found to be necessary – as close by at the Farringdon Road Buildings of 1872–4. There George Gissing saw ‘vast, sheer walls, unbroken by even an attempt at ornament; row above row of windows in the mud-coloured surface, upwards, upwards, lifeless eyes, murky openings that tell of bareness, disorder, comfortlessness within … millions of tons of brute brick and mortar, crushing the spirit as you gaze. Barracks, in truth; housing for the army of industrialism, an army fighting with itself, rank against rank, man against man, that the survivors may have whereon to feed.’10 Meanwhile, Engels wrote The Housing Question (1872), arguing that capitalism could not provide an answer. By 1875 around 32,000 Londoners were housed in model dwellings – fewer than had lived on the ground the buildings occupied, and less than the annual increase in London’s overall population. 9

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES The projects were an achievement, but they were insufficient to the scale of the problem, and in any case unaffordable for many working people. In some districts the flats were hard to let simply because of the level at which rents were set. Legislation in 1866, 1868 and 1875 permitted limited public intervention, mainly in the shape of compulsory purchase and slum clearance, but effectively left others to follow through with the provision of housing. The East End Dwellings Company was formed in 1882 with the intention of housing the really poor as others had failed to do, but was soon forced to move upmarket. Octavia Hill pioneered another approach, ‘self-help’ and direct management, an important corrective to the notion (still prevalent today) that any amount of design or technology can lastingly improve housing if there is no follow-through to address maintenance . This is all to focus on the housing ‘problem’. A wider, distinctly less negative and less well known context to the history of blocks of dwellings is set out in Richard Dennis’s chapter about residential flats and densification. It illustrates what a wide range of flat living there was in London in the decades either side of 1900, giving particular emphasis to mansion flats built for middleclass occupancy – not so much the top end in and around the West End, but modest lower middle-class solutions that, it is argued, have greater relevance to present-day needs. Meanwhile, demand for housing overall was, as before, overwhelmingly met by speculative leasehold development, low-rise and low-density – ‘miles of silly little dirty houses’, as in the title of Colin Thom’s case study of different housing types in Battersea. Thom stresses that few working-class families occupied whole houses, as was also the case in many other places, even further out, as in South Acton where domestic industry was a factor (see Chapter Five). Few of Victorian London’s smallest houses survive; what does still stand are miles of somewhat less little houses, for the most part now far from silly (except perhaps in their price tags) or dirty, but rather spick and span. This eminently adaptable development has long outlasted the original lease periods. The durability of this type of housing is explored here by David Kroll and Sofie Pelsmakers with a focus on practical sustainability. It is also evident from Tanis Hinchcliffe’s study of the gentrification of mid-nineteenth-century middle-class housing in Canonbury. Philanthropists and speculators were not Victorian London’s only suppliers of housing. Many working people did attempt to fend for themselves. Building societies and freehold land societies were important, as in both Battersea and South Acton. The Artizans’, Labourers’ and General Dwellings Company , a collaboration launched in 1867, built low-density owner-occupied suburban cottage estates in Battersea, Queen’s Park and Hornsey. In principle these offered community living underpinned by co-operation and self-help, but the houses were unaffordable to many, if only because of the cost of travelling to central London where work was to be found. In reality, the enterprise slid into conventional speculation. There were also enlightened freeholders. The careful stewardship of landed estates that characterised the West End in the eighteenth century was brought up-to-date and directed at a less elite market on the Minet Estate in Lambeth. David Kroll’s case study in this volume presents a detailed investigation of who did what, illustrating adaptive evolution and diversity over a long period in housing that a century later has proved eminently sustainable. Other developers – for example Archibald Corbett around Ilford and Hither Green, and John Farrer around Muswell Hill and Crouch End – also made significant and long-lasting impacts. Corbett and Farrer both kept 10

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW PETER GUILLERY going, adapting their outputs well into the twentieth century. Our Battersea case study also shows that, as on the Minet Estate, there were explorations of purpose-built flat living in private developments, a subject covered more systematically by Richard Dennis. Travel costs had limited the scope for working people to move out from central districts. The 1883 Cheap Trains Act was a landmark change. It provided for workmen’s fares of a penny a mile, making it easier for working-class people to escape inner slums. It opened the way to proliferation of the cottage flat (sometimes maisonette flat). This tenement type, commonly associated with Newcastle (the Tyneside flat), had been modestly revived in the 1870s by Matthew Allen, Waterlow’s collaborator, in Stoke Newington (see p83), and by Banister Fletcher in Pentonville. After 1883 it became a well-rooted vernacular housing form in London, and is readily found in two-storey terrace speculations in numerous then outer locations, from Hornsey, clockwise to Walthamstow, Leyton, Woolwich, Charlton, Catford, Battersea (see p41), Acton and Harrow, places where it was obvious houses would be immediately divided, and where rents for flats could be afforded by working families. Speculators frequently found whole houses difficult to sell so accepted that they were building for low-rent and working-class occupancy. This subject is raised in several chapters here and was directly addressed at our conference by David McDonald (this and other conference papers not in the volume are mentioned here because podcasts are available).11 There were also private tenement developments, by entrepreneurs such as James Hartnoll and the Davis Brothers, as is discussed in Richard Dennis’s chapter, where he draws on Isobel Watson’s work. Housing for single women was a problem newly perceived and innovatively addressed around this time.12 The establishment of council housing is not a subject directly addressed in any of the chapters in this book. It should therefore be summarily explained here, if only because it is crucial to recognise how slowly and reluctantly public housing was arrived at. Following the disappointing impact of earlier legislation, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Inquiry into the Condition of the Abject Poor of 1883 followed Engels in concluding that ‘without State interference nothing effectual can be accomplished upon any large scale’. As if in accord, the Royal Commission of 1884–5 concluded that housing needed to be handled as a matter of necessary social provision, not just as a market. An Act followed, but more effective was the Housing of the Working Classes Act of 1890, passed largely thanks to the newly formed London County Council and its Progressive administration. Local authorities were now permitted to build and manage housing. The LCC’s first major initiative, the Boundary Street Estate of 1893–1900, seemed an exemplary start, but it was laid out at unrepeatable expense. And, as so often happens, clearance pushed the existing population out – only 11 of the 5,719 people evicted were re-housed on the redeveloped site, and overall density was actually reduced.13 Meanwhile new housing trusts started up, notably Guinness, Sutton and Samuel Lewis. The second half of the nineteenth century had seen London’s huge housing problem shunted around, with some real improvements, but without any telling solutions. In Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898; reissued as Garden Cities of Tomorrow in 1902), Ebenezer Howard proposed a novel approach – the building of new towns away from London, beyond a green ‘belt’, an idea that was initially carried forth in Letchworth and Welwyn in Hertfordshire. On London’s then margins there appeared related co-operative and private initiatives, exemplified by the 11

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES Brentham Garden Estate (Ealing), Northwood and Ruislip Garden Estate, the Bostall Estate (Bexley), Hampstead Garden Suburb and Aldersbrook (Redbridge). The LCC picked up the theme in its pre-1914 cottage estate suburbs at Totterdown Fields (Tooting), Norbury, White Hart Lane (or Tower Gardens, Tottenham) and the Old Oak Estate (East Acton). After the First World War, house-building was given new stimulus in a campaign to provide homes ‘fit for heroes’, in Lloyd George’s resonantly demagogic slogan. Not for the first time, the threat of revolution or unrest (rent strikes) concentrated minds. England’s first full-scale programme of subsidised public housing was initiated by the Addison Act of 1919, to which town planning was seen as a necessary adjunct. This required local authorities to survey and provide for housing needs, and allowed central government to give financial assistance to local authority building programmes, adopting the low-density principles and generous space standards recommended by the Tudor Walters Report of 1918. Much of that had been written by Raymond Unwin, who with Barry Parker had been involved with both Letchworth and Hampstead Garden Suburb, and whose writ now ran as Chief Housing Architect at the Ministry of Health. As Mark Swenarton pointed out in discussion at our conference, Unwin disliked cottage flats – which caused Frank Baines, who had been responsible for the wartime housing of munitions workers in the picturesque Well Hall Estate in Eltham, to resign from the Tudor Walters committee.14 Inter-war cottage estates, public and private, followed these precedents, and the influence of Howard, Unwin and Parker lasted. Between 1921 and 1935 the LCC built about 24,000 houses in Becontree – the world’s largest public-housing estate, outside the Council’s jurisdiction north of Dagenham – and there were other substantial overlapping projects at London’s outer margins, such as the Bellingham and Downham Estates south of Catford. This approach was only possible where land was available. The LCC was not alone; much was also done by borough councils, both inside and outside the LCC area. In the only Labour stronghold within the LCC boundaries that was not already largely built over, Woolwich Borough Council put up more than 4,000 cottageestate homes across its southern parts in Eltham, maintaining an ideal of houses for all. Like many authorities, Woolwich built efficiently and productively through direct labour, establishing its own Direct Labour Organisation in 1923. The inter-war period also saw enormous speculative development as London grew outwards, encouraged by the Conservatives who promoted building societies and owner occupation as a guard against socialism. Houses for sale were accessible only to the middle classes and the highest paid manual workers, yet the output of houses – which peaked at almost 73,000 in 1934 – overshadowed local authority house-building, which did not top 16,000 after 1927. Among the many firms that built in the thousands were the Metropolitan Railway Company’s Metropolitan Country Estates (Metroland) in the north-west; Richard Costain and Sons in the south and north: John Laing and Sons, mainly north-west; New Ideal Homesteads, mainly south-east; George Wimpey and Co., here and there; and Reader Brothers, mostly north-east. In some places, status was carefully guarded. Basil Scruby and Co. did not permit terraces or bungalows in Petts Wood, to keep standards up in a high-class suburb that was designedly quasi-rural. Consciousness of potential limitless sprawl, along with rural if not prelapsarian sensibilities, informed the designation of the Green Belt in 1938. This followed a process in which Raymond Unwin had been instrumental for the Greater London Regional Planning Committee, formed in 1927. 12

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW PETER GUILLERY In older central districts, slums needed to be cleared. Space was tight and the LCC perforce built more densely – generally neo-Georgian brick walk-up blocks of flats and maisonettes, sometimes picturesquely laid out and detailed, as in Bermondsey’s Dickens Estate (recalling his account of Jacob’s Island), the Hughes Fields Estate in Deptford or the Holland Estate in Spitalfields. Finsbury Borough Council fought hard for generous space standards at the Margery Street Estate in the early 1930s, but cuts in subsidies and output pressures pushed this building type towards plain monotony, as at the LCC’s Honor Oak Estate. The LCC’s biggest housing project in the late 1930s was White City, Shepherd’s Bush, to house 11,000. There, garden-city principles were thoroughly abandoned in a tight array of five-storey blocks. A similar evolution can be discerned in private developments. Abraham Davis had moved on from East End tenements to establish first London Garden Suburbs Ltd and then, in 1914, the Lady Workers’ Homes Company, which, at the Holly Lodge Estate in Highgate in the mid-1920s, moved away from garden-city appearances for the sake of density. Similar bulky simplicity is evident in Costain’s Dolphin Square, a huge private development of service flats of the late 1930s. Through the inter-war period, inner London districts had seen the building of middle-class housing, mansion blocks and service flats of many types, much of it ‘mid-rise’ or walk-up, including – at the exclusive Modernist extreme – Berthold Lubetkin’s Highpoints One and Two. Private speculation kept itself geographically distinct. As Tanis Hinchcliffe pointed out in her conference paper, middle-class enclaves resisted the building of council houses.15 Overall, a great deal was achieved between the wars to keep pace with London’s growing population, but one important background fact to be borne in mind is that, as difficult as London’s growth then was to manage, Britain’s imperial might and wealth meant that to a significant extent, living standards were achieved at the expense of large parts of the rest of the world in ways that are no longer possible. History is not a pattern book. The war of 1939–45 and its bombs changed everything, catalysing huge shifts. In the short term there were prefabs, experimental in their materials, yet sometimes enduring much longer than intended (perhaps most famously at the Excalibur Estate in Catford). John Henry Forshaw and Patrick Abercrombie’s influential London plans of 1943–4 proposed density bands or rings, declining with distance from the centre, and mixed development in terms of dwelling types to defuse arguments about flats versus houses. The Ministry of Health’s Dudley Committee Report Design of Dwellings (1944) advanced national standards and a housing manual, also encouraging socially mixed populations. Despite war losses and the undersupply of housing that was only in part a consequence, there were still slums to be cleared. At the same time further sprawl had been ruled out, and an egalitarian drive demanded improved living standards. Comprehensive Development Areas were handled by the LCC wherever possible, except at trusted Woolwich. ‘Decanting’ (eviction) was a huge difficulty, as were contested compulsory purchases, but post-war ‘comprehensive’ redevelopments were carried through with a firm eye on social justice, to provide better housing for ordinary people, with generous space standards that were maintained until 1980 following the Parker Morris Committee’s Homes for Today and Tomorrow (1961). This scene is set out more extensively in the Battersea and South Acton case studies in this volume, where much of the interest lies in the ordinariness of the places. More extraordinary (and celebrated) were some notable architectural successes, from the Scandinavian tones of the Lansbury Estate in Poplar, linked to the Festival of Britain, to the introduction of Corbusian slab 13

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES blocks into a picturesque parkland setting at Alton West in Roehampton, on and out to new towns such as Harlow. All these contexts are discussed in Simon Pepper’s chapter about the arrival of high-rise development, a complex subject the dynamics of which – in terms of housing need, construction economics, planning nostrums and aesthetic judgments that were passed on as imperatives – is explored in an account that moves from comparatively well-known sites, Churchill Gardens in Pimlico and Roehampton, to focus on less-known developments in Stepney and Poplar, mentioning on the way the High Paddington scheme of 1952, unachieved and an uncanny prefiguration of the Paddington Pole project that was scrapped in 2016. There can be little doubt that high-rise was imposed in many places where it was not wanted and where it need not have been, as is again true now when more than 400 high-rise buildings are in the pipeline. However, good high-rise (tower block or slab block) housing for council tenants is not an oxymoron, as David Roberts’s inspirational study of the Balfron Tower makes entirely clear. Its westerly sister, the Trellick Tower, was the subject of a paper at our conference delivered by Emma Dent Coad.16 London has many other council-housing exemplars, high-rise and low-rise (the last comparatively undersung), for which there is space here for no more than name checks: the work of Lubetkin, and his partners and successors in Finsbury, Paddington and Bethnal Green; Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar; the Pepys Estate in Deptford (see Owen Hatherley’s foreword); Dawson’s Heights in East Dulwich; Lillington Gardens in Pimlico; Central Hill in Upper Norwood; and a range of Camden projects exemplified by the Alexandra Road Estate.17 Pressure of demand and shortage of labour led to the adoption of system building, an early 1960s exemplar of which was the Morris Walk Estate in Woolwich (depicted on the cover). Especially once it coincided with centrally imposed cost-cutting, industrialisation did not prove to be the hoped for panacea; the collapse of Ronan Point in 1968 was as much a symbolic as a practical failure. More fundamentally and widely, an inability to plan or provide for maintenance was a critical failing, arguably part of a more general naivety about money. Mark Swenarton’s study of the Alexandra Road Estate, presented at our conference and published elsewhere, examines the generally overlooked issue of how, following the economic downturn in the 1970s, politics enforced a narrowing of scope in the building of council houses at just the point when architects were beginning to get it right in terms of producing the kind of housing that many people wanted.18 In the minefield of unintended consequences that is housing history, tightness of money helped to reinforce a souring of attitudes to the welfare state. Representational tropes shifted from the ‘little palace’ to the ‘hell hole’, reprising earlier perceptions of slums or rookeries.19 Self-build housing is another important story not represented in the following chapters, and one that now has great resonance thanks to technological change and the development of custombuild. It is important because it avoids both the dirigisme of state provision and the moneygrubbing of speculative development, while prioritising reception and use over design. Its history is not a London-centric story, if only because of land costs, but Walter Segal’s experimental timber modular and dry-jointed structural self-build system, flexible, cheap and simple, was granted a break-through in Lewisham. Colin Ward – anarchist, planner and writer – had floated the idea of the ‘Do-it-Yourself New Town’ underpinned by approval from a planning authority, and persuaded 14

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW PETER GUILLERY key figures in Lewisham to take up Segal’s approach on ‘gap sites’, provided that priority was given to families on the council’s housing waiting list brave enough to build for themselves. Segal Close (1977–82) and Walter’s Way (1983–7) followed: just 20 houses, expressing both variety and unity. Segal’s system was never an answer to housing shortages, and certainly was not suitable for all, but for primarily political reasons it was inadequately exploited. Lewisham colleagues Jon Broome and Bob Hayes founded Architype and followed on with 13 more houses in Woolwich in 1992–5, all built for themselves by members of Co-operative Housing in SouthEast London (CHISEL).20 At Maconochie’s Wharf on the Isle of Dogs, 89 self-build houses went up in the late 1980s. Other milestones of successful resistance to the state/capitalism, public/private binaries in the 1970s and 80s were the occupation of Tolmers Square, Coin Street Community Builders and the Bengali Housing Action Group. The decline of council housing after 1980 left a vacuum into which housing associations moved, gradually expanding into greater significance. In this sphere, the Peabody Trust represents continuity in the revival of the social (as opposed to public) housing of which model dwellings companies were the Victorian exemplars. The resurgence of Peabody is illustrated in Chapter Three, though without mention of the precariousness that the 2016 Housing and Planning Act has brought to the independent social landlord sector through the introduction of a ‘Right to Buy’. The rise (and fall?) of housing associations, the impact of the conservation movement, Housing Action Trusts, the complex politics of tenure and the origins of regeneration are more than can be fitted into this brief introduction, as are other fascinating subjects such as warehouse conversions and live/work spaces, not to mention the success of Berkeley Homes, Section 106 Agreements and recent rather vexed attempts to relaunch council housing. The centrality of finance to matters of tenure emerges clearly from Tanis Hinchcliffe’s study of early gentrification in Canonbury: she highlights changes in the availability of mortgages as a crucial factor, helping to explain how housing was turned over from one class to another, also adumbrating how the disastrous ‘Right to Buy’ policy was transformed into the ‘right to sell’. At our conference, David Ellis spoke about gentrification in Islington in the 1960s and 1970s, drawing attention to campaigns to municipalise private housing to ward off gentrification. There is more on gentrification here in the Battersea chapter. Meanwhile, via Oscar Newman’s ‘defensible space’ theory as absorbed by Alice Coleman, as well as through other routes, council housing had been stigmatised and residualised – ugly words for ugly processes that were in large measure slyly tied up with immigration. This is further explained in the context of South Acton, and has been investigated by Ben Campkin at the Aylesbury Estate.21 Thus was born the ‘sink estate’, a term of wide but dubious currency that Campkin unpicks thoroughly in his chapter here. Such uses of language – along with ‘Right to Buy’ and other manoeuvres – have contributed to the evisceration of public housing, also decried by David Roberts in Chapter Eight. That has served to legitimate gentrification as regeneration, leading to the unnecessary and disruptive demolition of sound housing and increasing London’s problems. The blaming of architecture for deeply entrenched social problems is a thread that runs through this book. It prompts recall of William Morris’s reminder that ‘as long as there are poor people they will be poorly housed’.22 15

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES Addressing that has always, of course, been not a matter of architecture, but one of politics and ideology, especially in London. Not all great cities have had such contentious or commodified housing histories.23 There is a simple overarching trajectory to housing politics in London across the period considered in this book. From 1850 it took about 40 years for the realisation to take hold that capitalism would not solve housing problems, and for the idea of public provision to gain acceptability. Another three decades passed before state supply settled down to being normative. For the next 60 years it held sway as the primary solution to housing want across a period of broadly static population and through a post-war crisis, and did end up neutralising housing as a major political issue. At the time of writing, all but another 40 years has passed, during which public provision has been abandoned, and capitalism or market ‘solutions’ that supported private ownership have been favoured. With a rising population, housing has returned to the top of the political agenda. What next? This is history, not prophecy. Capitalism and state power are and have long been dominant forces, neither entirely benign, and neither now wisely looked to exclusively for salvation, in housing or any other sphere. Simplification is rarely helpful other than in an illusory or rhetorical sense. As complexity has long characterised London’s housing history, that, if nothing else, must be taken into account in addressing current problems.

16

CHAPTER ONE URBAN DESIGN IN VICTORIAN LONDON: THE MINET ESTATE IN LAMBETH C.1870 TO 1910 DAVID KROLL

The Minet Estate is a mainly residential area of around 60 hectares in south London in today’s London Boroughs of Lambeth and Southwark. This chapter examines the planning and design process of the Minet Estate and discusses the roles and relationships of those involved in creating the housing: surveyors, architects, builders, landowners and developers. The focus is on the main phase of its development, which took place from c.1870 to 1910. The research is based on an unusually comprehensive archive of a Victorian housing estate in London, a detailed study of which has not previously been undertaken. The Minet Estate provides an example of Victorian housing development that is architecturally more diverse than is generally the case with housing projects today. It involved a large number of different small builders, designers and architects, and a level of complexity and sophistication in its planning that is rarely appreciated in the literature. This case study contributes to a more detailed understanding of the planning and design of late Victorian speculative housing, which has proven to be unusually long-lasting, adaptable and desirable – key measures of sustainability.

WHY THE MINET ESTATE? At the time when the Minet Estate was built up in the late nineteenth century, London was still expanding rapidly in area and most new housing was built on ‘green fields’, on land that was previously agricultural. The height of the housing on the Minet Estate varies, ranging from a mixture of terraced, semi-detached and detached houses of two to four storeys to several blocks of flats of four to five storeys. In contrast, most recent large-scale development within Greater London, such as the Athletes’ Village in Stratford and the Millennium Village on the Greenwich Peninsula, takes place on brownfield or greyfield land, and often at significantly higher densities. What, then, can we learn from a past that took place within a very different urban, economic and political context? What are the parallels to the challenges we face today? Firstly, new greenfield development at densities such as the Minet Estate can still take place today, but usually outside Greater London. In fact, new large-scale housing development at various densities outside the Green Belt has been one of the approaches to the tackling of London’s housing crisis.1 Furthermore, a highly controversial government consultation proposes to allow councils to allocate land on the Green Belt for starter homes.2 In light of these 17

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES discussions, it is worth remembering a particularly productive period of house building that has left us with such a remarkable legacy.3 The Victorian houses that survived post-war slum clearance are today among the most popular housing types in London and have demonstrated an extraordinary longevity.4 The Minet Estate has all those qualities and characteristics that Christopher Costelloe has described as exemplary about ordinary Victorian housing: ‘density, cohesiveness, quality of materials, walkability, generally good public transport, and their infrastructure of pubs, corner shops and public buildings’.5 A recent research study on ‘sustainable suburbia’ by MJP Architects underlined Costelloe’s assessment and praised Victorian terraced housing as particularly positive for ‘sustainable’ densities of generally over 50 dwellings per hectare that promote walkability.6 The example of the Minet Estate is also pertinent considering that not all new development within Greater London is necessarily high-rise. Current discussions of how to build more housing also involve suggestions to raise densities in existing low-density areas, but in a way that allows them to retain their ‘family friendly’, suburban character.7 The Minet Estate is a successful example of such an area with housing at varied densities. It could be an appropriate model in particular for the outer suburbs of Greater London and the commuter belt. The houses built on the estate range from two to four storeys and are examples of the kind of Victorian terraces, detached and semis that are familiar in many areas of London. Unusually for this part of London at the time, the estate also has a number of blocks of flats, which were built around the turn of the century when the estate was running out of available land. The Minet Estate hence comprises an interesting mix of housing at different densities, originally built for varied occupant groups. Apart from parallels to the present in terms of densities and housing types, a case study of the Minet Estate is also interesting with regard to the general processes of how housing was planned and developed, taking account of the roles and relationships of those involved in production such as surveyors, architects, builders, landowners and developers. Recent UK governments have tried to involve a greater variety of stakeholders in the planning and production of the built environment, as is reflected in legislation such as the Self-build and Custom Housebuilding Act 2015 and the Localism Act 2011. And yet, large-scale housing projects in the UK are generally built up by one house-builder in a centrally managed and planned process. In light of this discourse, it is interesting to note that in the nineteenth century, areas like the Minet Estate were developed by a large number of different stakeholders with wide-ranging influences on matters of design and construction. In the case of the Minet Estate, these diverse influences resulted in considerable variety in the architecture, ranging from variations in style and detailing to those in dwelling type and layout. The lessons that can be learnt are not only relevant to government and planning policy, but also to the growing custom-build movement. A final point to learn from the Minet Estate is linked to the other points above and concerns the finance of house building. This point is particularly relevant as the London housing crisis is firstly an affordability crisis. In terms of cost, the financial entry threshold to house building for a builder-developer or owner-occupier was much lower on the Minet Estate than it is today because there was no up-front fee for the land. Instead, the land was rented on an annual ground rent. This was an important reason why small builders without large initial capital were able to become house-builders. The case of the Minet Estate suggests that involving a greater number of 18

CHAPTER ONE DAVID KROLL stakeholders and decision-makers in the production of housing is also a matter of finance, in particular in relation to land costs, which are at a historic high.8 Otherwise, initiatives such as localism remain only a token to stakeholder involvement. For custom-build to have a chance at a larger scale, for example, and for people without significant capital like young, first-time buyer families to start building their own homes, financial thresholds to obtain suitable land would need to be lower than at present. What then makes the Minet Estate more worthy of study than other exemplary late nineteenthcentury estates? One key reason is the archival material available.9 The Minet Estate archive is one of the most comprehensive archives of a London Victorian housing estate that is accessible to the public, yet it has so far not been discussed in the literature in detail. The estate also presents a suitable case study because decisions taken in the early stages of its development, as well as their influence on the architecture, can be reconstructed from the archival sources. Finally, the Minet Estate is useful as a case study because it was in many respects ordinary, rather than avant-garde, and many of the findings are transferable to other London estates of the period. While the ‘ordinary’ Minet Estate is not pioneering or experimental like Bedford Park or Hampstead Garden Suburb, it is in some ways quite unusual. For example, the later phase of the development was not purely profit-driven but partly philanthropic, which can be seen in the donation of a public park (Myatt’s Fields) and a library (the Minet Library) by the owner, William Minet. The estate was also probably unusually well managed and resourcefully planned, which has left us with largely very attractive and still very popular residential architecture. Although the housing on the estate accommodated people with varied income levels, many of the larger houses in particular were built for, and initially occupied by, fairly well-to-do tenants. Thus the estate is not representative in every respect. However, the way it was built up by following the then typical English leasehold development system means that there are similarities with other housing estates of the time. Many of the basic conclusions of this chapter are therefore also often applicable to other privately developed Victorian and Edwardian housing estates.

SYSTEMS OF ESTATE DEVELOPMENT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY While it is difficult to define what constitutes a typical Victorian estate, certain generalisations can be made. As a fundamental distinction, speculative housing estates of the period were developed in one of three ways: 1 By contracting builders directly to construct the houses 2 By selling the land as freehold to builders 3 By letting the land as leasehold to builders Each of these systems of estate development had an impact on the resulting architecture and on the degree to which the estate owner influenced the development. As a context to the Minet Estate case study, it will be useful to touch briefly on these different methods of development.10 The first of these three methods – to contract builders directly to build all the houses on an estate – was uncommon in the late nineteenth century because of the high risk and initial investment involved. Exceptions can be found, such as some of the houses built on the estates developed by 19

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES Archibald Cameron Corbett. But even with the financial resources of one of London’s largest developers of speculative housing at the time, Corbett abandoned his experimentation with direct contracting of building work and reverted to the leasehold and freehold development that was standard for housing estates in late nineteenth century London.11 In this more conventional practice, rather than financing the building of the houses themselves, the estate owner spread the financial risk to a number of different builders by letting individual building plots as leasehold or by selling plots as freehold. The pattern of dividing the land along roads into small adjacent plots (large enough for the construction of a house) was ideal for these systems: a small speculative builder could raise the funds for building a house on one of the plots; larger builders who were able to raise sufficient capital could take on a number of plots and sometimes entire streets, or occasionally even a number of streets. Large house-builders who purchased, developed and built whole estates, however, were rare until the inter-war period, when it became easier for builders and also buyers of houses to obtain finance.12 The third method – to develop an estate by letting land to different builders as leaseholds – was very common in the nineteenth century, but was in decline towards the end of the century and seems to have been hardly used after 1914.13 Land was leased to speculative builders in the same way as it would have been leased to farmers when it was in agricultural use. The estate owner would charge an annual ground rent which was paid by those who owned the leasehold at the time. After the lease fell in, often after 99 years, the land returned to the freeholder, often an heir of the estate owner who agreed the lease.

FIGURE 1.1, ABOVE This map of the Minet Estate was begun in 1843 by Messrs Driver, the estate surveyors, and updated until about 1890 to record all leases. It was an essential estate-management tool. A smaller separate plot to the top right was sold off in 1872. 20

By letting land as leasehold, the estate owner usually had a longer-term interest in the development, and it was therefore in his interests to retain a higher degree of control over the planning and design of the housing. This control could range from a detailed masterplan to a more indirect influence consisting of the management and approval of the builders’ own designs. The long-term financial return from a leasehold development was potentially significantly higher than from selling the freehold: the annual ground rent could provide a continuous source of income for the estate owners and their heirs. Most of the Minet Estate was developed using this third

CHAPTER ONE DAVID KROLL method, by letting land as leaseholds to various builders (Figure 1.1). Only the blocks of flats were constructed with the first method of directly contracting the work to builders.

HISTORY OF THE MINET ESTATE BEFORE 1870 The Minet family descended from Huguenot refugees fleeing persecution in France in the 1680s.14 Hughes Minet bought the estate in 1770 after retiring from a successful career in banking. Until the nineteenth century, most of the area and its surroundings remained agricultural, with the exception of a few buildings on Camberwell Green and Camberwell Road. From 1819 onwards, the first speculative housing on the estate was built along Camberwell New Road, soon after it had been constructed to connect Camberwell Green with Kennington Common. However, building activity on the estate was still minor with most of the houses on Camberwell New Road dating from much later, 1838 to 1845.15 James Lewis Minet, the estate owner at that time, did not initiate any significant building activity on the remainder of the land until the late 1860s. By then, much of the surrounding area had already been built up.16 The approximate1870 start date for the main phase of the estate’s development was due to a combination of factors. One was simply that the growth of London had reached the area, another that a railway line was constructed in the early 1860s on the edge of the estate. For the railway tracks, station and associated buildings, James Lewis Minet sold part of the estate to the London Dover and Chatham Railway, which disrupted established leases and prompted the first substantial phase of housing development on the estate.17 Camberwell New Road Station, located in the north-east part of the estate, opened in 1862 and a number of houses and shops were built across from the station by 1870.18 However, the main phase of development started when James Lewis Minet began to implement a long-term plan by leasing a large part of the estate to the builders Parsons & Bamford.19

BUILDING ON THE MINET ESTATE 1870 TO 1885 Most of the estate was built between c.1870 and 1910 in two principal phases, first under James Lewis Minet’s ownership and then under that of his son William Minet (Figure 1.2). In both of these phases, the leasehold system was a key planning mechanism which provided the legal framework and also shaped the architectural form and layout. The two phases, however, were also distinctly different. The planning of the first phase (c.1870–85) was more controlled in that there was an overall masterplan to which house builders needed to adhere. The lease agreement between James Lewis Minet and the builders James Henry Parsons and Samuel Bamford, with the solicitor George Mayhew as their representative, had a key influence on this first phase.20 The agreement was drafted by Messrs Driver, surveyors who had an important role in the development of the estate. The firm had managed the estate on behalf of the Minet family since 1818 (then trading as A & E Driver), and Messrs Driver not only prepared maps and surveys of the property, but were also responsible for drafting and administering lease agreements, and for collecting and keeping a record of the ground rents on the Minets’ behalf. The Minet Estate was one of many properties that Messrs Driver managed in the nineteenth century. In 1869 the firm was, in fact, one of the most eminent surveyors, auctioneers and land agents in London, involved in many high-profile 21

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES

FIGURE 1.2, ABOVE This map shows how the Minet Estate was developed and leased in segments. Construction generally started soon after the lease start dates shown. 22

CHAPTER ONE DAVID KROLL property transactions of the time.21 The size of the Drivers’ business suggests that the Minet Estate was not unique, and that it was probably managed in a similar way to other estates on the company’s books. Surveyors at the time also had an ‘urban design’ role on estates to be developed, as they were generally responsible for the layout of roads and building plots – and often even for the design of houses.22 As context for what I am, with conscious anachronism, referring to as the urban design of the estate, it should be noted that planning approval by the local council, as we know it today, did not yet exist. Building applications in the 1870s were subject to compliance with the Metropolitan Local Management Act (in its 1862 revision), but the process was closer to today’s building control application than to a planning or development control application.23 A building application then was about compliance with health and safety concerns such as structural safety, fire safety and public health (drainage). The Metropolitan Local Management Act, and later the London Building Acts, also contained basic urban planning rules on building heights, minimum street width and alignments of street facades with a building line.24 However, a building application would pass as long as it complied with these basic general rules. This lack of development control in the sense we understand it today, however, also meant that the role of the estate owner – or the estate surveyor as the owner’s agent – was particularly significant in coordinating the architecture. In relation to the process of Victorian urban design, the Parsons & Bamford lease agreement is a useful document in many regards. At first glance, it simply appears to set out the conditions of sale, but a careful read of its ten handwritten pages of legal jargon reveals that there is more to it. Besides its legal and financial implications, the leasehold agreement also entailed a meticulous plan for the development of the estate – what we might now call an architectural masterplan. The Parsons & Bamford lease agreement was accompanied by a map which set out streets, plot sizes and also house types (Figure 1.3). Elevations and floor plan templates for the houses were provided by Messrs Driver for use by the builders. The distribution of the houses by cost reflected economic demands and also social hierarchies of the time. Cheaper houses were allocated on less desirable plots, expensive houses on the more desirable plots. A similar layering of the cost of houses around the railway can be found in other areas in London: the housing between Hither Green Station and Manor House Gardens in south-east London, for example, shows a similar gradual transition from small working class terraced housing near the railway to upper middle class semi-detached and detached houses nearer the park. The 1891 census confirms that in Carew Street on the Minet Estate (house type E, the least expensive house type, with a minimum value of £300), for example, those listed as household heads generally held manual occupations, such as plumber, builder, cabinetmaker, milkman, laundry man or painter.25 It is interesting to note that one of these type E houses, originally built for those on lower incomes, was sold in November 2015 for £735,000.26 The houses along Paulet Road (house types C and D, with a minimum value of £600) were rented by a higher number of those with clerical occupations (Figure 1.4). The houses with shops (house type F) were located near Camberwell New Road Station. Unsurprisingly, with the station closed, many of the shops have since been converted for residential use. 23

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES

24

CHAPTER ONE DAVID KROLL What is particularly interesting about the Drivers’ map is that there was in fact a blueprint setting out the type and cost of the houses (and with it a social structure) before they were built. The architecture was the result of a conscious and wellcoordinated effort of planning it in this way. The type and size of houses to be built was not, as often assumed, simply left to the builders. When the houses were designed in the 1860s and 1870s, their typology and sizes were also no longer determined by the building acts. They were, however, probably still influenced by them, as the house classes, established for taxation purposes in the 1774 Building Act, had only been abolished with the 1844 Metropolitan Building Act.27 When the Minet lease was drafted in 1869, most of this new part of the estate was expected to be completed within six years, in line with gradually increasing ground rents, to which Parsons & Bamford agreed (Table 1).28 The remainder – about another 65 houses – was to be completed after nine years. The pace at which sub-leases were taken up by other builders, however, was not in line with the expectations of the lease agreement. The six-year plan with an annual ground rent increasing to £1,008 was therefore never put in place. It took nearly two decades for the whole of the Parsons & Bamford plot to be built up, rather than the expected nine years. Despite the uniform appearance of the houses determined by the Drivers’ scheme, they were not built by one contractor, as would usually be the case today. Parsons & Bamford only completed a few of the houses themselves. On their behalf, Mayhew sub-leased most of the building plots to other builders at an annual ground rent for a period of 99 years from 1869. For 27 Paulet Road (the rear of which was facing the railway depot), for example, Mayhew paid £1 to James Lewis Minet in annual ground rent, but he sub-leased the same plot to the builder Richmond Nurse for £2.29 FIGURE 1.3, OPPOSITE Map of the Minet Estate reconstructed from Parsons & Bamford lease agreement, setting out the types of houses to be constructed by cost, as well as the location of other buildings such as pubs and shops. FIGURE 1.4, ABOVE Houses in Paulet Road, an example of D-type houses with a minimum value of £600. Built in the 1870s by different builders using the floor plan and elevation template as defined in the Parsons & Bamford lease agreement.

Of course, in return for this increase in value, Mayhew, Parsons & Bamford had the additional costs and responsibilities of building the roads and services, and of managing the development. This system of leasehold development helped to facilitate construction by a multitude of builders and also acted as a de facto financial lending mechanism (Figure 1.5). On the Minet Estate, there was no up-front fee for leasing the land and also no rent in the first year. This meant that the initial financial outlay required for building houses was much lower than it is 25

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES TABLE 1 Completion schedule from Parsons & Bamford Agreement, 1869 Time (years)

today, when prices of land in London are generally higher than the cost of a house built on it. The only funds that builders needed were those for materials and labour.

No. of houses/buildings to be completed Detached

Semidetached

Terraced

2

3

15

25

3

4

20

50

4

7

35

80

5

9

55

120

6

10

75

150

Pubs

1

2

The reason that the houses constructed in the first phase have a uniform, controlled appearance was because the street facades had to be built to elevations provided by the estate surveyors. An estate agent, J Blenkin, was based in an office on the estate, and part of his role was to check that the houses were completed in line with these elevations. On closer scrutiny, however, it becomes apparent that, as specified in the lease agreements with the builders, only the elevations were tightly controlled. The leaseholders appear to have had influence on layout, interior decorations and fit-out, which is reflected in variations of the standard floor plan types in the building applications to the district surveyor. The leaseholder-builders largely lived locally and were also often occupants of their own houses while construction of their next one was under way.30 They therefore had a significant stake in the success of their product, both as occupiers and because it formed the basis of their livelihood. Even in a tightly controlled and ‘masterplanned’ housing development, such as the first phase of the Minet Estate, the freedom for customisation and stakeholder involvement appears greater than is usually the case in house building in England today, when houses are generally sold as finished, standardised products. This degree of customisation of the layout and fit-out did not cease when the houses were first built. While the street facades have remained nearly unchanged to this day, the interiors of the houses have changed significantly. These changes range from updates of the décor and building services, to substantial reconfigurations of the dwellings. Many of the houses of this first phase of the Minet Estate development have since been converted into flats, reflecting today’s greater demand for smaller dwellings in the area.31 That the buildings can accommodate such reconfigurations is a testimony to their adaptability and durability. Despite those changes, the intentions of the original masterplan and lease agreement are still reflected in the buildings today; the facades remain largely unchanged, but the interiors have been customised and adapted to suit changing occupation patterns, fashions and ownership.

26

CHAPTER ONE DAVID KROLL

BUILDING ON THE MINET ESTATE 1885 TO 1910 The second phase of house building on the Minet Estate was distinctly different from the first. James Lewis Minet took a hands-off approach to the development of the estate and left the day-to-day management of design and construction to others, such as the estate surveyors, Messrs Driver. After 1885, however, with the succession in ownership to William Minet, the planning of the estate changed fundamentally. William Minet took a much more active interest in the day-to-day work of estate development and also directly appointed his own estate agent, Fred Curtis, who was based on the estate. William Minet visited weekly, approved many of the drawings personally, and Curtis did not take any significant decision without first consulting him.32 Curtis was responsible for rent collection and the management of building agreements and maintenance work. Curtis’s role was also to manage the Cooperative Builders, who William Minet helped to set up in 1889 to construct a number of blocks of flats on the estate and provide continued maintenance of the buildings.33 A key change in relationships occurred after 1885. During James Lewis Minet’s ownership, the elevations and house types had been imposed on the various lessees by the freeholder (Figure 1.6); under William Minet, however, house designs would now be proposed by the leaseholders and then approved by the freeholder. These two systems were not unique to the Minet Estate: most leasehold housing at the time would have been developed in either one of these two ways, with the design either imposed on the lessee by the freeholder or proposed by the lessee and then approved by the freeholder.

FIGURE 1.5, ABOVE Map of the Minet Estate (detail of Figure 1.1) with names of first leaseholders, often but not always the builder. This does not clearly distinguish between lessee and sub-lessee. The map is therefore only indicative. Even so, it illustrates the number of different lessees and the builders involved.

The difference between these two systems might seem like a mere formality, but it had clearly visible architectural consequences and explains why the parts of the estate planned and built before 1885 are more uniform in appearance, and why the parts built afterwards appear more diverse. For example, in Paulet Road, built up before 1885, all the houses have the same facade, while in Calais Street, built up in the 1890s and 1900s, each house or pair of houses looks different (Figure1.7). After 1885, rather than being based on a masterplan by Messrs Driver, designs of the individual houses came from the leaseholders themselves (Figure 1.8). Some of these designs were prepared by the builders if they had the skills. Some were prepared by architects or surveyors appointed by the 27

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES

FIGURE 1.6, ABOVE Organisational flow charts during James Lewis Minet’s ownership 1839–85 (top) and William Minet’s ownership 1885–1932 (bottom). They summarise roles and relationships for the two major phases of the estate development. 28

CHAPTER ONE DAVID KROLL

FIGURE 1.7, ABOVE On Calais Street each house or pair of houses was custom-built to a different design and by different builders. No. 11, for example, the house in the middle, was built by the Cooperative Builders for WH Spragge, 1901. 29

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES leaseholder. While the architecture was evidently inspired by various sources, there is no evidence to suggest that the designs were copies of pattern book examples; instead the houses were generally custom-designed, even if their style and detailing relied heavily on inspirations from similar precedents.34 A letter of April 1904 from Fred Curtis to the builder and lessee Peter Arundell reflects the system for the second phase of the estate build-up under William Minet: ‘Mr. Minet has approved your plans of the houses you are proposing to erect in Calais St. + if you will let me have duplicates of them + of the specifications for their construction when you return the enclosed building Agreement duly signed … the matter can be settled before I leave town on Saturday next. Yours truly, F. Curtis’.35 The majority of the houses on the estate were built by speculative builders constructing for an anticipated demand in response to which they would then sell them on or rent them out. Peter Arundell & Sons and Andrew McDowall & Son were the most prolific speculative house-builders on the estate after 1885. Peter Arundell & Sons constructed more than 50 houses there over a period of about twenty years, beginning in the late 1880s as a sub-lessee to Mayhew in Upstall Street; Andrew McDowall & Son constructed just over 90 houses, and one of the streets on the estate bears the name McDowall.36 However, some of the houses – those facing Myatt’s Fields Park along Calais Street and Cormont Road – were developed by owner-occupiers rather than by speculative builders. The system for those houses is explained in more detail in a letter of September 1901 from Fred Curtis to WJ White, a potential lessee and owner-occupier for 14 Calais Street:

FIGURE 1.8, ABOVE Drawing for house in Cormont Road, built by Peter Arundell and designed by Ernest Avery, ‘Architect & Surveyor’, c.1897. 30

‘In reply to yours of the 4th inst. the ground rent for the first six months of the Lease would be a peppercorn only. I have not yet submitted this matter to Mr Minet as he is not in London, so that while I have no doubt that he will agree to assist you in the building of the house proposed, this or any other letter of mine must not be taken to bind him in any way until I have an opportunity of consulting him. The usual way of proceeding is this: you would have plans & specifications of the house prepared & obtain an estimate of the cost from the builder, entering into a Building Agreement with Mr Minet. You would pay down to him the difference between the amount you propose to borrow and the cost of the house. He enters

CHAPTER ONE DAVID KROLL into a contract with the Builder & pays him & when the house is completed grants you a lease which you mortgage to him to secure the amount he has advanced, the first instalment becoming due the next quarter day.’37 Curtis’s letter also reveals that William Minet assisted leaseholders on occasions with finance to facilitate building work. Minet would advance the mortgage amount to the lessee so they had the funds for the construction of the house; once the house was built, the lessee could take out a mortgage against it and pay Minet back. It was a system that allowed him to keep his investments and risk low, but at the same time encouraged potential tenants to take on the leasehold and enabled them to build their own houses. A centrepiece in the planning of the estate was the creation of Myatt’s Fields Park as part of the second phase of the estate development. William Minet donated the park to the newly formed London County Council (LCC) in 1889, soon after he inherited the estate.38 The park itself was designed by England’s first professional woman landscape gardener Fanny Rollo Wilkinson.39 While undoubtedly a generous, philanthropic gesture, Myatt’s Fields Park also became an important asset for the estate. It contributed significantly to establishing an attractive, leafy surrounding for the adjacent housing and helped to attract well-to-do tenants. This effect can be seen on the Booth maps of 1899 of the area, which show a particularly high concentration of wealthier tenants around the park.40 Although the houses facing the park were occupied by and probably intended for upper-middle class tenants, those planned after 1885 were generally in terraces rather than semi-detached or detached houses. Experience of earlier development had shown that smaller terraced housing was more quickly taken up by lessees than larger, more expensive detached and semi-detached houses. Beyond its effect on its immediate surroundings, Myatt’s Fields Park was also important in linking the estate in character to the generously spaced, largely semi-detached, wealthier and more desirable area to the south-west, rather than the poorer area to the north-west. This link was reinforced in the layout of the new roads Brief Street, Calais Street and Cormont Road, which were approved by the LCC in 1891.41 Cormont Road and Brief Street are both orientated to the south-west, while avoiding as much as possible any links to the north-west. The only road connection to the north-west, the extension of Calais Street towards Lothian Road, was not part of the original layout and only added later, receiving approval from the LCC in 1893.42 The greener, more loosely planned later phase (after 1885) and the more rigidly planned earlier phase were also products of their time. By the late nineteenth century, the density and rigidity of Victorian speculative terraced housing – so-called by-law housing – was often blamed for poverty and squalor. Long before it became official town planning policy in the inter-war period, more green space around houses was a widely propagated solution to create healthier places in which to live. In 1865, for example, GL Saunders stated in a paper to the influential National Association for the Promotion of Social Science: ‘It is already clearly demonstrated that the more you pack the people together, the greater is the amount of disease and death.’43 Bedford Park, begun in 1875, was one of the first housing estates to give form to such ideas.44 While the Minet Estate could not be considered part of this architectural avant-garde, its planning after 1885 still seems to have been influenced by such ideas; the more spacious later phase of the 31

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES estate, with generous vegetation and meandering roads, not only has similarities with the planning of the area south-west of the estate but also with the green and somewhat irregular layout of Bedford Park, which seems more than coincidental. William Minet was probably aware of Bedford Park and envisaged a similarly spacious, greener surrounding for the housing on his estate. Even if the urban design of the Minet Estate was not avantgarde, its planning was nevertheless clever and forwardthinking in many respects. One of these was its mixture of low-rise housing with blocks of flats, which was fairly unusual at the time. When available building sites became scarce, William Minet broke with the typically low-rise house building of the area and took a risk by commissioning the construction of five blocks of flats (Figure 1.9). The flats increased the overall density and gave Minet a higher rental income than from the land alone. At the same time, the area still retained a village-like quality, supported by Myatt’s Fields Park in the centre with mainly low-rise housing around it. All the blocks of flats were built around the turn of the century: Burton House (1892), Calais Gate (1903), Orchard House (1897), Dover House (1899) and Hayes Court (1900). The blocks were generally well built with careful architectural detailing, which is particularly apparent in the Calais Gate building, which was constructed by the Cooperative Builders under the guidance and supervision of Fred Curtis (Figures 1.10–1.11).45 The attention to detail in the architecture of these buildings reflects the pride that William Minet took in every aspect of the estate: the signs of personal attachment are ubiquitous on the estate, which is full of references to Minet family history, ranging from family crests with a cat (referring to the French meaning of the word minet: ‘kitty ’), to names of streets and buildings (Calais Street) and to family references in decorative stone mouldings (Calais Gate).

FIGURE 1.9, ABOVE Brief Street, built in the 1890s, showing the transition from houses to blocks of flats and the increase in density during the estate’s final development phase. The houses to the left were constructed by AB Gee. The block of flats to the right was by the Cooperative Builders. 32

Unlike the houses, the flats were not sold on long leases of 99 years but were instead rented to tenants on annual leases.46 The blocks of flats also did not have the same degrees of customisation and adaptability of the houses built on the estate. Victorian and Edwardian blocks of flats were built with largely load-bearing walls, so subsequent changes have probably only been cosmetic apart from updates to building services and technology.

CHAPTER ONE DAVID KROLL

CONCLUSIONS AND LESSONS FROM THE MINET ESTATE A perhaps all too obvious but key conclusion from this case study is that it was indeed planned. The housing was not somehow generated through by-laws and pattern books: it was actively planned and designed, and its development managed, at times with a high degree of sophistication – reflected, for example, in the Parsons & Bamford lease agreement. Formal planning tools were used, mainly building or lease agreements, drawings and specifications. Various stakeholders – landowners, estate surveyors and agents, builders and architects – played key roles at different stages of this process. And the estate was also planned in that its arrangement and layout were carefully considered. As has been shown, the roads, green spaces, types and sizes of housing were deliberately laid out to respond to their surroundings and also to market conditions of the time. This process itself was, of course, not always linear and often driven as much by commercial considerations as by architectural ones. Overall, the considered planning and management of the development was an important reason for the success and quality of the housing on the estate to which William Minet contributed considerably during his ownership. His intentions were not simply to create as many houses as quickly as possible, but instead he took a long-term view of the impact of his decisions.

FIGURE 1.10, ABOVE, TOP Calais Gate, built 1903. One of the blocks of flats built on the Minet Estate in the last phase of its development. FIGURE 1.11, ABOVE, BOTTOM Detail drawing for Calais Gate, 1903.

The contrast between the earlier development phase under James Lewis Minet and the later phase under William Minet is striking, and is only partly due to the changing architectural preferences of the time. As outlined above, the nature of the lease agreements with the builders had an important impact on the architecture. In the earlier stages of development before 1885, the design was prepared by the freeholder’s agent, the estate surveyor, and imposed on the lessees. In the later phase after 1885, the main responsibility for design was with the leaseholder, and the freeholder only approved it. This duality can also be related to other speculative housing in London. Any speculative housing estate in the nineteenth century that was consciously planned would have had to adopt one of these two extremes – either the design was led by the estate owner or it was led by the builder of the individual houses. 33

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES The Minet Estate case study also shows that Victorian and Edwardian estate planning could support degrees of diversity, customisation and adaptability in its architecture. These qualities were not accidental but part of the original conception of the buildings, and they continue to contribute to the houses’ desirability today. The structure or framework for this openness was the simple layout of building plots along roads. Customisation was driven by the leaseholders who built and often also occupied the houses; coherence in the architecture was achieved either by controlling street elevations or by a process of approval from the estate owner or agent. In terms of potential lessons for London today, it would be naive and also undesirable to propose that the positive qualities of the Minet Estate’s development could simply be transplanted into the present to provide easy answers to current issues. There are, however, aspects of Victorian house building as shown in this case study, that could provide inspiration for housing today. One key aspect is that the development allowed for and promoted diversity in its architecture and stakeholders, which was supported by the leasehold development system and financing model, as well as in a simple yet responsive development control framework. It is conceivable, for example, that a local authority could procure a similarly coherent, but individually diverse estate like the Minet Estate today using custom builders and Local Development Orders. Custom-build developments in the Netherlands, such as those in Amsterdam and Almere, as well as Graven Hill in the UK, could be cited as successful precedents with many similarities.47 Certain aspects of the Minet Estate’s development were controlled, while others were left to those who occupied and built the houses, which helped to facilitate a degree of openness to future user adaptations and changes. This approach could provide inspiration for today’s planning system in England. The design of the buildings on the Minet Estate simply complied with the Building Acts and was coordinated by an estate surveyor and agent. The Minet Estate could therefore be built up without lengthy planning negotiations, which today can often take years even for small buildings in London, further adding to the unaffordability of housing. It is conceivable that today’s planning process could be simplified for particular developments, making a swifter, more predictable decision process possible again.48 Another aspect of the Minet Estate’s development and Victorian housing that could provide ideas for addressing today’s housing affordability crisis is the financing. More than construction costs, a significant barrier to custom- and self-build today is prohibitively high land costs. Any attempt to involve more small-house builders, as well as custom- and self- builders with low capital like first-time buyers, would need to address this barrier of high land costs and find ways to lower the financial entry threshold. On the Minet Estate this happened through the leasehold system. The price for the land was nil initially, but then a ground rent was charged over a 99-year period. In some cases, William Minet even provided a loan to help with construction costs (as reflected in the letter above from Fred Curtis to WJ White). For example, one way of lowering this financial threshold could be to offer suitable sites – such as those owned by local councils or philanthropic landowners – to custom- and self-builders at an affordable initial cost as leaseholds; the lessees would then be responsible for the design and building of the houses. The initial purchasing cost for the land could be kept low by transferring it to affordable annual ground rents. Land that can be rented at secure ground rents would significantly lower the threshold for house building and make initiatives such as custom- and 34

CHAPTER ONE DAVID KROLL self-build accessible to a much larger part of the population.49 Such a leasehold development system could be profitable for both the landowner and the leaseholder who builds the housing. This idea may sound like fiction in the current market, but one does not need to look far to see that it is feasible: a similar model, the so-called Erfpacht system, has been successfully employed on a large scale in the Netherlands, making custom-build an affordable and real option.50 These are some suggestions drawn out of the case study of the Minet Estate; there may be others. The crucial point seems to be this: the Minet Estate shows that diversity in scale, stakeholders and architecture was possible then, creating a lasting, adaptable and attractive built environment. If the Victorians could do it, why can’t we?

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CHAPTER TWO ‘MILES OF SILLY LITTLE DIRTY HOUSES’: THE LESSONS OF VICTORIAN BATTERSEA COLIN THOM

Today in the terraced streets of south Battersea, beside Clapham and Wandsworth Commons, rich people live in Victorian houses built for lowly artisans, clerks and shopkeepers. Meanwhile, in north Battersea, most of the Victorian workers’ housing erected there has been swept away and replaced with post-war council housing, much of it high-rise. Why is this so? This chapter looks at the building boom that accompanied Battersea’s spectacular population growth in the second half of the nineteenth century and considers the contrasting stories and trajectories of the houses provided in both the north and south of the area. It describes briefly the rapid provision of mass housing for families of generally low income, and investigates the adaptability of the Victorian terraced-house plan for multiple occupation and the eventual introduction of ‘cottage flats’ and maisonettes as the ideal form of housing for such an increasingly densely built-up district. The chapter also takes into account questions of permanence, sustainability and the life-span of such housing, as well as its gentrification, and considers what lessons can be learnt for the future in terms of conservation and new housing provision.

BATTERSEA’S VICTORIAN HOUSING ‘If you wanted to create something dreary and wretched, it would be difficult to create anything more dreary or more wretched, than Clapham – the Clapham of the Junction and the miles of silly little dirty houses between the Wandsworth Road and Battersea.’ This vivid pen-picture of Battersea’s Victorian working-class houses comes from the sculptor Eric Gill, looking back in later life on a district he knew well around 1900, when as a teenager and young married man he travelled regularly from lodgings firstly in Clapham and then in Battersea Bridge Road to the practice of WD Caröe in Westminster, where he was training to be an architect. Like many before and after him, Gill misplaces his topographical identifiers, Clapham Junction being deep in the heart of Battersea. By Gill’s time the recently redeveloped shopping district around the railway station there had overtaken the old High Street to its north as Battersea’s commercial centre.1 The ‘dreary...wretched housing’ that Gill referred to was the physical manifestation of Battersea’s population explosion in the years between 1840 and 1914. The remorseless growth of London as a whole during that time put tremendous pressure on its housing capacity and infrastructure in a way that has obvious resonances today. 37

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POPULATION GROWTH AND EXPANSION Along with neighbouring Clapham and Camberwell, Battersea was one of several villages south of the Thames whose peacefulness and rurality had made them popular locations for wealthy Londoners in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By 1800 these villages had bloomed into convenient suburbs for merchants and businessmen, road and bridge improvements having made a daily journey to the City feasible, and beyond the ribbon development of their old high streets elegant villas peppered the surrounding green fields and market gardens. But the coming of the railways in the 1830s and the startling growth of London in the years that followed saw these once salubrious southern districts swamped by a new population and a new kind of building development. South London was where this growth was seen at its greatest and no district witnessed population increase as dramatically as Battersea: it leapt from 10,000 people in 1851 to over 50,000 in 1871, and then doubled again within ten years to just over 100,000 by 1881, a phenomenon regarded at the time as ‘so remarkable as to deserve special notice’.2 By 1901 it had reached 170,000, larger than many provincial towns. How did Battersea cope? The immediate reaction was two surges in house-building, in the 1840s and early 50s, and again in the late 1860s, mostly in the north of the district where the village centre was located and where railways and industry had both begun to make inroads.3 By 1870 there were around 9,000 houses there, as opposed to 3,000 only ten years earlier. Then came Battersea’s biggest building boom, in the late 1870s and early 1880s, which began to spread further out towards the district’s less developed edges, including the higher southern stretches near Wandsworth and Clapham Commons. By the 1890s the land in the poorer north had been entirely exhausted and thereafter any new building took place in the south. Though there were exceptions – such as some sizeable villas in the early years of development, and some better-class residences on the Crown Estate around Battersea Park and in the south between the commons – by and large the new housing erected was of the type described by Eric Gill (Figure 2.1). FIGURE 2.1, ABOVE Victorian terraced housing north of the Clapham Junction railway tracks, 1938. Nearly all these houses have since been demolished for the Winstanley and other post-war public housing estates. 38

Several factors contributed to the particular character that Battersea took on over the Victorian era. Firstly, in contrast to

CHAPTER TWO COLIN THOM other parts of London, Battersea had an unusually fragmented landownership pattern when suburban building began around 1840. The tithe commutation of the mid-1830s identified 165 different landowners in Battersea, of whom 100 held less than five acres.4 A few big estates were created later on, such as the land bought by the Crown for Battersea Park, or the site of the Artizans’, Labourers’ and General Dwellings Company’s Shaftesbury Park Estate; but these were special acquisitions and were atypical. Small plots of landownership were the norm. As Figure 2.1 suggests, the railways also contributed to Battersea’s transformation from rural idyll to smoky suburb. Land was cheap and the proximity to central London made Battersea attractive to the various rail companies clamouring to gain access to and from the metropolis. Railway development began in the 1830s with the cutting of the London and Southampton route, slicing through the green fields east of Nine Elms, and in time a veritable cat’s cradle of rail lines had been introduced, criss-crossing through Battersea, further breaking up the already bitty landholdings, bringing ‘noise and ugliness’ to the area.5 North Battersea’s topography also influenced the type of housing built there, much of the riverside land being in places below the Thames high-water mark, and – despite the local authorities’ best efforts – still prone to flooding. And there was industry along the river in the form of works, wharves, and factories, with chemical factories being especially prevalent. All were factors which conspired against the easy or successful creation of a suburb with any social aspirations.

Housing Typologies Naturally there were many different kinds of workers’ dwellings built across Battersea during the nineteenth century, but the characteristic type of the Victorian building booms was the low-grade, speculatively built brick terraced house. Generally of two or three storeys, and frequently flat-fronted, these were narrow properties, of around 13–16ft (4–5m) frontage on average, usually with one or two main rooms to a floor (Figures 2.1–2.3 and 2.6–2.7).

FIGURE 2.2, ABOVE Remains of Victorian housing in Ingrave Street, Battersea, 1970s

This type was already well established in London by 1840 and as late as 1900 was still regarded as admirably suited to the class of people who came to live in Battersea, with between three and seven rooms, and often with its own kitchen and scullery in a 39

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back extension, as well as an outside WC and its own front and back door.6 Although basic, such structures offered a surprising degree of flexibility in terms of usage. Ostensibly designed as single-family residences, most two-storey houses by this date had at least two families living in them, each occupying a floor, and sometimes more when families let single rooms to lodgers for much-needed extra income. Rents, though relatively low compared to those in more central districts, still accounted for a high percentage of a working family’s income. By this date a labourer in regular employment in London could expect to earn around 25s. (shillings) or 30s. a week, but once he had paid for food for his family would probably have only about 9s. left to cover other expenses such as clothing and heating, as well as rent – hence the need to share houses and take lodgers. Rents in 1898–1900 in Battersea were priced at around 10s. to 14s. per house, with single rooms on offer as lodgings at 2s. 6d. to 3s. , which would be a great help to families having to pay 5s. or more in rent for a floor. Charles Booth had defined the poverty line in the late 1880s as being a weekly wage of less than 21s. per week, and poverty’s inevitable consequence was overcrowding; few working-class families could afford the higher rents that would allow them to escape it.7

FIGURE 2.3, ABOVE View down Mantua Street, north Battersea, in 1960. Typical working-class housing of the 1850s–70s, all now demolished. 40

Of course there were inconveniences to this style of living. With piped cold water and a copper for heating it only available in the ground-floor scullery, tenants of the upper parts of the house had to carry their water up (and slops down) the communal stairs. By the 1880s, however, architects and builders were running up houses of this kind specifically with multiple occupation in mind, providing shared ground-floor sculleries or sometimes two-storey back extensions with room for kitchens and bathroom-cum-sculleries on both floors. Charles Booth later reported that he thought Battersea had a ‘great advantage’ in having houses of this kind that had been ‘specially

CHAPTER TWO COLIN THOM built to suit the classes that have occupied them ... Great ingenuity has been shown, and a type of house has been produced which can be arranged for either one or two families.’ Late 1880s terraces built by the developer Alfred Heaver on an estate immediately south of Clapham Junction Station – on Comyn, Eckstein and Severus Roads – seem to correspond to this type, with deep back extensions on all floors. Other examples can be found in Montefiore Street and Ingelow Road, on the Park Town Estate, also of the 1880s (Figure 2.4).8 By around 1890, architects and builders had fine-tuned this mode of tenement living to provide a more elegant, purposebuilt solution, incorporating separate front doors for each family into a continuous terrace facade. Sometimes referred to as maisonettes, they were at the time known as tenement or ‘half’ houses, or ‘cottage flats’, a term apparently coined by the social reformer Octavia Hill to differentiate this new lateral style of housing from the traditional London side-by-side terraces.9 Such buildings were already well known in Scotland and northern England, and there were precedents too in London among the earlier work of the housing associations in the 1850s and 1860s, such as the Metropolitan Association’s Albert and Victoria Cottages in Spitalfields.10 Cottage flats soon began to appear all over Battersea, instantly distinguishable from the terraced houses around them by their having two front doors. Speculative builders were quick to fling them up in areas where the working classes were superseding any still-hoped-for middle-class presence. Examples from the decade either side of 1900 include 21–51 Lurline Gardens and 10–56 Prince of Wales Drive, near Battersea Park; all over the Park Town Estate but especially in and around Tennyson Street, St Philip Street, and Robertson Street; off Lavender Hill; in Latchmere Road and Theatre Street ; and also on the borough’s extreme edges, in the south near Balham at 92–138 and 188–226 Boundaries Road, and to the north-east off Clapham Common North Side, at 1–67A Wix’s Lane (Figure 2.5).

FIGURE 2.4, ABOVE Elevation and floor plans of typical tenement flats of c.1884–90 on the east side of Montefiore Street, Park Town, Battersea. Like many cottage flats on the Park Town Estate, these were probably designed by the architect JS Cooper.

At first glance, these latter, turn-of-the-century examples resemble pairs of semi-detached houses, with their entrances grouped centrally between bay windows with pyramidal roofs; but each ‘pair’ contains four apartments, each usually comprising a sitting room, one or two bedrooms, scullery, bathroom and WC. Built at a cost of around £150 to £200, these simple little flats were found by Booth to be the most 41

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES fashionable type of accommodation for young working-class families. A hundred years later, they now sell for £850,000.11 And when Battersea Council began to build its own municipal housing in the early years of the century, in its first estates at Latchmere and on Town Hall Road, the dominant house-type was the cottage flat.

BATTERSEA’S BUILDERS AND THE LEASEHOLD SYSTEM For anyone familiar with our modern development system and its leviathan companies, it can be a surprise to discover how much of Battersea’s Victorian built environment was the work of a myriad of builders, craftsmen and individuals from all walks of life, often operating on a remarkably small scale: the Battersea historian Keith Bailey has shown how, in the period 1840–1914, over 1,400 such firms or individuals were at work in the area, providing between them a total of some 25,000 new houses. Yet more than half of these people built no more than half-a-dozen houses, while around a third built only one or two.12 This tallies with what is now known of the building industry in London as a whole at this time, and especially in the expanding suburban frontiers of south London, where 83% of its builders were constructing fewer than twelve houses a year.13

FIGURE 2.5, ABOVE Cottage flats of around 1900 in Wix’s Lane, Battersea, 2011. 42

Such a fragmentation of building development might seem unexpected, given the existence since the early 1800s of large-scale contractors and master builders like Thomas Cubitt, whose firm employed around 2,000 men of all building trades and handled all aspects of construction.14 But speculative house-building in rapidly expanding working-class suburbs like Battersea seems to have been considered a discrete business in the Victorian building industry, separate from the traditional estate development and public-works contracting of inner London, and was undertaken by a specific and largely localised workforce – mostly small speculators and tradesmen living in the area or nearby, who flocked to the latest ‘building sites’ as London’s inexorable growth brought increased demand for small houses. During Battersea’s first big boom years of the 1860s and 1870s, house construction was still essentially a handicraft, and one for which the financial threshold for entry was low. Only a little capital was needed to help an enterprising individual step on to the first rung of development and erect a few, small, working-class houses and profit in the rush to build

CHAPTER TWO COLIN THOM – there was no professional body as such to control their activities. Also, there were plenty of investors willing to speculate in the process by offering mortgages. And in an era of continual boom and bust, with bankruptcy common among builders at this level, it must have helped that when one or two failed or developments stalled, there were always more men willing to step into the breach. Charles Booth found the building industry to be the biggest single source of employment in Battersea during this period.15 The typical pattern was for these individual builders to take small parcels of leasehold land for development. Even in the area’s few bigger estates – as in Park Town, on the Crown Estate at Battersea Park, and in the several estates acquired by freehold land societies – this piecemeal method of leasing and construction still predominated. The system enabled builders to work together as part of a development that would normally be beyond their capabilities, and without the requirement to spend hard-to-find capital for the purchase of land. Leasehold building was also a popular channel for ordinary people to invest their savings or legacies by lending money to builders through mortgages. The system took hits during the bouts of economic depression and credit shortages that followed each building boom, but it was robust enough to provide adequate accommodation for hundreds of thousands of new residents, and produce a profit, if modest, for most of those involved in it.16 A single example can illustrate the wider picture of development in north Battersea, and the complicated chains of lessees and investors that could be involved in the provision of such low-status houses as those in Gwynne Road (Figure 2.6). One of the houses there, No.51, on the south side of the road, was erected in 1879 by a local builder, William Henry Williams of Meyrick Road, for which he received a 90-year lease from the freeholder, James EA Gwynne, paying an annual rent of £6. The day that he acquired the lease, Williams immediately arranged a mortgage (with the No.3 Borough of Lambeth Permanent Building Society) and just over a month later sold or assigned his lease to a master bricklayer, William Brooks of 62 Gwynne Road, who then arranged a mortgage loan of his own with the Woolwich Mutual Benefit Building Society. By May 1882 Brooks, now a grocer, had moved to No.51, and negotiated a surrender of the old lease with Gwynne in exchange for a new one with an 87 and a half -year term from 1882, at £20 per annum, which he later used to secure a further loan. In similar ways, all over Battersea, several financial interests were being carved out of thousands of small Victorian houses.17 It was not until the next big boom of the 1880s–90s that this localised, fragmented trend in suburban building finally began to fade. The depression of the 1870s had been hard on many of the smaller local builders and firms, who had gone under, but the middling sorts of builders – firms that could take on 50 to 100 houses or more a year – managed to hold on and survive. By the 1890s and early 1900s even bigger firms had begun to predominate, building 300 or 400 houses – harbingers of the kinds of firms that would come to dominate suburban house-building in London in the inter-war years.18

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CASE STUDIES: NORTH OF THE RAILWAY Poyntz Road Triangle This little area, east of Latchmere Road, is one of the few surviving vestiges of the low-key small Victorian housing developments that were once common all over north Battersea. It is also a prime example of the effect on the area’s housing of untrammelled railway growth, with railway lines on all sides acting as barriers, slicing an already fragmented pattern of landownership into smaller pieces. The triangle of three streets here – Knowsley, Poyntz and Shellwood Roads – came into being in the 1870s, after the various lines of the West London Extension Railway had been completed in the 1860s and the surplus land at their centre was let for development. George Todd Junior, a builder-developer and surveyor who was active in Battersea in this period, probably designed the simple street layout in the late 1860s for the railway company, which then offered house plots for sale. Many were bought freehold by Ewan Hare, a Putney solicitor, after whom the area was initially called the Harefield Estate. Hare and the railway company then sold off blocks of land to small-time developers and speculators, whose builders then took leases and ran up the houses.19

FIGURE 2.6, ABOVE, TOP Gwynne Road, Battersea, in the early 1900s, from a postcard in Battersea Library. FIGURE 2.7, ABOVE, BOTTOM Poyntz Road, Battersea, looking into Knowsley Road, houses of the 1870s in 2011. 44

Though many different individuals were involved, the houses were all fairly similar, conforming to the standard pattern of the area’s Victorian workers’ housing, being of two storeys without basements and consisting of only five or six rooms. Most were built in short runs, a lengthy terrace along the north side of Knowsley Road being the exception, and were generally flat-fronted, though a few were given modest ground-floor bay windows (Figure 2.7). These small houses came with little in the way of amenities, but the opening of the municipal Latchmere Baths close by in the 1880s offered people the chance of a second-class slipper bath . Early residents were a mix of the respectable and poorer working classes – skilled craftsmen such as carpenters, joiners and plasterers, but also porters, labourers and laundresses. A mission hall in Poyntz Road (since demolished) offered soup and bread to underfed local children.20 By the early 1970s, following many years of blight, Wandsworth Council was planning to demolish these streets for new housing, as it was doing elsewhere in north Battersea through

CHAPTER TWO COLIN THOM compulsory purchase. Worried that such decisions were being taken without local community involvement, residents formed an association and undertook a detailed survey of tenure, socio-economic structure and housing conditions in the area. The results were enlightening. There was a surprising degree of social cohesion in this enclave, many residents and families having been there for ten or even 20 years or more, and some were the third generation of their family to have occupied the same house. Although a few properties were in public ownership, most were rented from private landlords, and the standard of maintenance and basic amenities were generally low. Residents argued that such landlords could rarely afford the cost of basic repairs, and that a policy of limited council involvement through house purchases and improvement would benefit the community far more than outright redevelopment. Owner-occupiers were on the increase and had fared better in securing discretionary grants for kitchen, bathroom and attic extensions.21 A strong local campaign and the residents’ detailed and convincing report persuaded Wandsworth Council to overturn its plans, and the ‘triangle’ has blossomed since, proving to be an attractive and popular area with existing residents and new buyers. Its rehabilitated houses – most of them now with attic extensions and improved amenities, and some painted in pastel colours, adding a touch of ‘mews cottage’ picturesqueness – are one of north Battersea’s success stories.

The ‘Three Sisters’ area Originally known as the Surrey Lane Estate (a name now associated with a modern high-rise estate on the other side of Surrey Lane), the Three Sisters area comprises five streets of houses (Orbel, Henning, Edna, Ursula and Octavia Streets) developed in north Battersea in the 1870s and 1880s on the crest of another local building boom. The modern name derives from the three female street-names, commemorating members of the developer Edward Pain’s family, wrongly assumed to be sisters. Pain was a solicitor, originally hailing from Somerset, who had been dabbling in building speculation in Battersea since the 1840s and seized the opportunity to develop the fields here surrounding a detached house called Tower Lodge that he had built as his own residence in 1844. By the 1860s, Pain had left to live elsewhere and the house was demolished as part of the development scheme.22 Unusually for north Battersea, these streets were built up not with the customary tightly packed terraces but with more eligible semi-detached two-storey ‘villas’ – still relatively small and rudimentary in terms of architecture and built without much in the way of variety across the entire estate, but with enough distinctive character to be indicative of the developers’ aspirations for middle-class interest, even at this late date. Their designer is not known, though in 1877 plans and elevations of a typical house were submitted to the Wandsworth District Board of Works by the solicitors Carr, Fulton & Carr, who represented the Pain family (Figure 2.8). These were presumably the work of a local architect employed by the firm, or perhaps of Pain’s son Arthur, a surveyor and civil engineer known to have been responsible for other plans of the estate.23 Most of the houses are of yellow-grey stock brick with red-brick dressings, but a few are entirely in red brick, and some have minor but attractive Arts and Crafts or Aesthetic-style decorations, such as cast-brick floral motifs around the entrance porches. At least 18 builders were involved, though one firm seems to have dominated: William Henry Iles and Thomas Wood of Pimlico were 45

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responsible for around 40 of the houses in Edna and Octavia Streets and all 44 houses in Ursula Street.24 The estate and its houses were well regarded when first built: the South London Press described the area as ‘the pleasantest, healthiest and even cheapest part of Battersea’, and the typical house type ‘the very idea of an English homestead’.25 However, by the early 1900s as elsewhere in the area many of the houses were in multi-occupation, as ‘double tenements’, having been let in the usual way in floors to different families, with a common passage and stairs. At the time monthly rents ranged from around 17s. (or 8s. 6d. per family in a two-storey house) to 20s. (i.e. 10s. per family) – around 40% to 70% above average. With a very good rate of survival among its semi-detached houses, this area, along with the terraces of the Shuttleworth Road area to its south, was among the earliest in north Battersea to enjoy a wave of regeneration in the 1970s and 1980s. In recognition of its distinctive character, the Three Sisters was designated one of Wandsworth Council’s Conservation Areas in 1999.26

FIGURE 2.8, ABOVE Plans of the Surrey Lane Estate, Battersea, 1874. 46

CHAPTER TWO COLIN THOM

CASE STUDIES: SOUTH OF THE RAILWAY Shaftesbury Park The most influential of the estates of workers’ housing built in Battersea in the era before the great building boom of the later 1870s and 1880s was the 42-acre Shaftesbury Park Estate, erected in the mid-1870s north of Lavender Hill on former market-garden ground by the Artizans’, Labourers’ and General Dwellings Company. Then, as now, it was viewed as a quintessential and highly successful workers’ estate, intended to be populated by the respectable sectors of the upper-working and lower-middle classes, as only better-paid families could afford its rents, or, as occasionally happened, buy a house freehold. This was not housing designed for the idle or desperate poor, and no pubs were allowed on the estate.

FIGURE 2.9, ABOVE Artist’s bird’s-eye view of the Shaftesbury Park Estate, 1874. (Engraving by H Johnson from The Graphic)

Behind Shaftesbury Park’s conception lay a conscious desire by labouring people to provide a decent level of housing for their own kind, in contrast to some of the poor accommodation and living standards that characterised parts of working-class Battersea at this time. There were over a thousand houses, designed in four classes, from a first or ‘clerk’ class with eight rooms, including a bay-windowed front parlour, down to a fourth class cottage of five rooms, two of them bedrooms. Also planned originally was a supporting range of social facilities (none of which involved alcohol), including a school, wash-house, community hall and meeting rooms, though in the event not all of these were built. Gardening was a popular pastime, emphasising the residents’ aspirational tendencies. 47

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES Most of Shaftesbury Park’s streets were lined with simple but pretty two-storey terraced cottages, of two bays, usually without basements or attics (Figure 2.9). One of the estate’s undoubted attractions was its unusually coherent architectural style, overseen by the Artizans’ Company’s own architect Robert Austin, with basic decorative touches applied to many of the houses in the form of Gothic-style porches, pointed window-heads and company monograms. Prominent ‘tower’ houses were located at some street corners and at the entrances to the estate. As a result, it acquired a robust identity and ‘air of independence’, which its residents seem to have enjoyed and which lifted its cottages above the dull monotony of most working-class housing. The estate’s undoubted success and strong sense of community made Shaftesbury Park an inspirational model in ensuing years for the development of cottage estates, and also for the garden-city movement. Today a considerable number of the houses are maintained as social housing by the Peabody Trust, which acquired most of the estate from the Artizans’ Company’s successors in the 1960s; this, along with the Conservation Area status awarded in 1976, has ensured a degree of consistency in terms of any changes to the fabric. But Shaftesbury Park’s popularity with middle-class housebuyers has encouraged Peabody to release an increasing number of properties for sale. Recent changes to the ‘Right To Buy’ discount in Wandsworth, now increased from £16k to £75k, may encourage more.27

Oberstein Road

FIGURE 2.10, ABOVE Oberstein Road, Battersea, in the early 1900s, from a postcard in Battersea Library. 48

This is a street of substantial semi-detached houses, with bays and dormers, part of an estate north of St John’s Hill developed in the late 1860s by Thomas Mackley, a local merchant, and aimed consciously at a middle-class market (Figure 2.10). Although there were other semis, most of the houses on the estate’s other streets – in Brussels, Cologne and Louvaine Roads – were in chunky three- and four-storey terraces, all in a similar simplified Italianate style. Several of the builders at work had also been engaged in contemporary developments in north Kensington, for example at Ladbroke Grove and Addison Road, which perhaps may have influenced the style of some of the houses. These men included William Parratt, who built most of Oberstein Road in 1863–9. Mackley’s investment was initially a success: there were only 83

CHAPTER TWO COLIN THOM households living in the estate’s first 74 houses in 1871, and more than three-quarters of these were employing domestic servants. Most were the families of merchants, manufacturers and public servants. But by the turn of the century the pressure on accommodation and demand for cheaper housing, as elsewhere in Battersea, had brought a downturn socially and an increase in multi-occupation, which continued into the twentieth century. After the Second World War the area became very popular with immigrants, especially those from West Africa and the West Indies. By the early 1970s many of the houses were badly run down.28 In 1974, these streets became part of a wider area selected by Wandsworth Council for comprehensive redevelopment. Angry at the threat of compulsory purchase and demolition, and the plans to impose more council housing, local residents formed a society, the Louvaine Area Residents Association (LARA), and proposed instead that housing in the area could be improved step by step over a longer period, as had been recommended in the Housing Act of the same year. As a result the Council gave way, purchased several properties, and the district was declared one of the country’s first Housing Action Areas (HAA). This helped save the Victorian houses from destruction and paved the way for most of them to be improved. LARA still remains a strong, active force in the area in all matters of local interest.29

Bennerley Road Running from the west end of Wandsworth Common across Northcote Road towards Clapham Common, Bennerley Road is typical of the streets of well-groomed terraced houses south of Battersea Rise, in the residential area now known locally as ‘between the commons’. Its route crosses two landholdings. The two longer runs of houses either side of Northcote Road were built in the 1860s and 1870s on land acquired by the Conservative Land Society, one of several freehold land societies active in Battersea at this time. The shorter stretch, up to Leathwaite Road, dates from the mid-1880s, when over 700 hundred dwellings were erected by an army of builders under Thomas Ingram and Henry Bragg, two of Battersea’s biggest Victorian developers, on land formerly occupied by two villas and their grounds. The two-storey houses with canted bays in this latter part are characteristic of the housing being built in large numbers across the area at that time: all are similar in style but with variants from builder to builder. Some are faced in stock brick, others in red, and occasionally enlivened or individualised by the simplest of decorations. These were the kinds of houses populated by the skilled and unskilled workers who contributed so much to London’s Victorian commercial vigour and success: railway porters, post office workers, waiters, messengers, police constables, builders, engineers, printers, shopkeepers, dressmakers, travelling salesmen, warehousemen, labourers, and above all commercial clerks of every possible type. Even in these more salubrious streets south of the railways and away from the riverside industries, most houses were home to two families. It was to these sturdy, affordable homes that the first trickle of new middle-class residents began to come in the 1970s, a trickle that in the following ten to 20 years turned into a flood. A five-bedroom house here will now cost you £2m.30

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HOUSING CONDITIONS AND POST-WAR REDEVELOPMENT IN NORTH BATTERSEA Graham Balfour, who researched and wrote on Battersea for Charles Booth’s study, thought that in general its poor were not badly housed. In his opinion it was bad tenants who made the houses worse, often removing every scrap of sellable or reusable fabric, such as wood or iron, that could be ripped out of them. However, such tenants must surely have been in a minority. Balfour also blamed ‘jerry building’, which he considered inevitable in an area where over 100,000 people had been housed within just twenty years.31 As in other working-class districts, the rapidity of Battersea’s expansion and the density of its new fabric naturally brought overcrowding and squalor, and there is no doubt that life was hard. But Battersea seems to have seen less of the desperate poverty that was so regularly found in the rookeries of the East End, and in the St Giles and Saffron Hill districts, and which was so effectively brought to light in the 1880s by George Sims, Andrew Mearns and other social commentators.32 What was perhaps more germane was the rapid turnover of the area’s poor tenants. In Victorian times the lower levels of society were in a constant state of flux, and a degree of mobility was essential in an unpredictable job market. Terms for rental properties were often short, sometimes monthly or even weekly, and arrears were common, so the ability to move short distances, even just a few streets away, was crucial and was made possible because so few working-class families had possessions. Added to which, Battersea witnessed a continual stream of newcomers in the 1860s–80s, further destabilising the existing social structure. Charles Booth found that when people stayed put for longer, they tended to form social or religious ties and become established locally, which encouraged better conduct.33

FIGURE 2.11, OPPOSITE View of the Winstanley Estate, Battersea, in 1966. George, Trew & Dunn, architects, for Battersea Borough Council. FIGURE 2.12, ABOVE A basement flat in Warsill Street, Battersea, 1964.

This perpetual motion among Battersea’s Victorian residents included what David Cannadine has termed a ‘game of follow-my-leader’, as the middle classes, pressed upon by the influx of artisans and skilled workers, moved to ‘new positions of exclusiveness’ further out, leaving their ‘old haunts’ to be occupied by their pursuers, who in turn, when wages and cheap transport improved, also moved further out to be replaced by 51

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES the labouring classes. Referred to in recent years as ‘downward filtering’, this process was called a ‘law of successive migration’ by Charles Booth. Time and again better-class residents moved away to be replaced by a lower class, and Booth was certain that Battersea was locked in a spiral of continual physical and social deterioration.34 The eventual result of this cycle of changing occupation and urban deterioration was that by the early to middle decades of the twentieth century much of Battersea’s housing stock was badly worn out and near the end of its useful life. Although Battersea Council and the London County Council were able to provide some much-needed public housing schemes, the effects of bombing and rocket attacks during the Second World War further exacerbated the situation. After the war, municipal rebuilding was slow, though the LCC did build some blocks and estates, and the local council began work on what were to become large new estates near Battersea Park Road and north of Clapham Junction. But in the 1960s, attitudes and the pace of redevelopment began to change: Battersea Council, coaxed on by Sidney Sporle, a new and radical Housing Committee Chairman, took the view that housing conditions had reached such a low ebb that wholesale demolition and renewal was the only possible way forward. Seizing the opportunity presented by the need for new housing to replace bombdamaged terraces, the Council planned a campaign of widespread clearance and reconstruction.35 Under Sporle, new estates were conceived and several estates already under construction were completed on a scale hitherto unseen in Battersea, underscoring the Council’s new commitment to build more quickly, at higher densities, and to rid the area of what was viewed as substandard older housing. Sporle was not one for refurbishment or rehabilitation: ‘Patching up, I call it.’ 36 There were some good new developments and for a time many families were able to enjoy better living standards. But too great a reliance on industrialised building methods at a time of cost-cutting, too many tower blocks that were never popular, and, above all, poor maintenance and rehousing policies, made large estates like the Winstanley and Doddington unpleasant environments, with what were to become the usual associated problems of vandalism and brooding teenage malevolence (Figure 2.11). The drawbacks of the high-rise form were emphasised in the 1970s by the success of a few well-designed low-rise local authority estates, such as Wandsworth Council’s Kambala Estate, erected just as council housing was being phased out by the government. In retrospect, and with our modern concerns for regeneration and sustainability, it is easy to be critical of Battersea’s post-war planners for their wholesale demolition of areas of viable terraced housing to make way for some often questionable high-rise estates. But it should not be forgotten that Sporle and his fellow local councillors who led this crusade were idealists, many of them raised in poor conditions in the very streets they were so keen to eradicate. They knew better than most that many of these houses were by then badly worn out from multiple occupation, poor environmental conditions, and a too regular turnover of underprivileged tenants; they were quite simply overused and exhausted (Figure 2.12). But the Council’s mistake was to condemn too much other housing that was repairable and which could have contributed significantly to Battersea’s regeneration. 52

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POST-WAR GENTRIFICATION IN SOUTH BATTERSEA Battersea seemed to be in terminal decline in the 1960s. Even in the better residential streets to the south, houses were run-down and in multiple occupation. But the survival there of good-sized Victorian and Edwardian properties, and the proximity to rail and tube links and to the commons for open space, had by the 1970s and 1980s made the area attractive to London’s expanding workforce of young middle-class professionals. Many of these incomers were at a particular phase of their lives and careers, usually at the pre-child or childbearing stages, and likely to move on to larger properties further out once their families and salaries grew, having benefitted from the opportunity to renovate their Battersea period houses and make a profit. It was this sudden increase in owner-occupation and the ability to benefit financially from it that really drove Battersea’s gentrification, changing the demographic balance as the prosperous young incomers supplanted their less wealthy predecessors, many of them pensioners. So frenetic was the pace of ‘improvement’ – that property prices in Battersea quadrupled within five years in the mid-1980s. Estate agents began to proliferate in shops around Lavender Hill and between the commons; wine-bars, restaurants and chic boutiques arrived to serve the burgeoning and affluent new population. Victorian and Edwardian houses near the two commons acquired gloss-painted panelled doors and refurbished tiled entrance porches. By the mid-1980s, the process was moving from these desirable period terraces even to some of the local authority tower blocks, which were being sold off to property developers and rebranded for young professionals. And so Battersea, once a byword for municipal socialism, became, as part of Conservative-run Wandsworth Borough, a ‘blueprint’ for Thatcherite inner-city regeneration.37 Since then there has been no stagnation evident in the area’s regeneration. Those early ‘yuppie’ gentrifiers of the 1980s and 1990s have moved on, and there has been a steady influx of more and more highly paid, university-educated middle-class residents, many of them working in the City of London’s financial sector. As a result, with almost no accommodation left to gentrify, prices have escalated to a level previously associated only with the capital’s established elite districts. This intensive social transformation of one district by a specific kind of wealth, allied to continually rising house prices, has been labelled ‘super-gentrification’. An area which only 30 years ago might still have been regarded as populated by a mix of various classes is now an enclave of the rich.38

CONCLUSION Victorian housing is a fundamental part of the capital’s built environment. It dominates the present housing stock and its distinctive architectural character and inherent flexibility make it attractive to prospective buyers and renters. What lessons can a study of Battersea’s building fabric provide when it comes to planning new housing, or the redevelopment of existing areas of apparently outmoded housing?

Public participation The successful rehabilitation of Victorian housing in Battersea, in formerly run-down districts such as the Poyntz Road Triangle or Louvaine Road area, was possible only because of pressure from, and the involvement of, local people. Before planning any changes to an area’s housing, government and local council departments must consult with residents to identify their needs and desires. Grants to help improve living standards or secure ownership for existing residents could also help ensure a more stable and socially mixed environment. 53

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Rehabilitation, not redevelopment With rapid strides being made in effective insulation and heat-retention, and improvements in technologies such as solar power and rainwater harvesting, there is no reason to demolish existing small housing for new, supposedly greener alternatives. There are many examples of Victorian houses being made more energy efficient and sustainable without undermining the historic and architectural qualities that made them so popular with residents in the first place.39 At a time of an acute shortage of affordable housing for key workers in London, there is much to be said for greater public sector involvement in rehabilitating small terraced houses in so-called blighted areas at a reasonable cost. Rehabilitation is often cheaper than wholesale redevelopment, which, in addition to the trauma of demolition, can have negative effects on social cohesion through displacement and the creation of an entirely new ‘district’. It also offers smaller builders an opportunity to contribute to the improvement of London’s housing stock. But the biggest obstacle to such a strategy is the tendency for any areas of surviving Victorian or later housing in London to become a focus for gentrification, rather than a socially broader regeneration. Regeneration or rehabilitation is also relevant when it comes to some of Battersea’s high-rise council estates. High-rise development is not necessarily the answer to London’s housing shortage, at least certainly not in isolated towers. It has been argued that Britain is a country with no strong tradition of high-rise residential living, many people still preferring to live in houses or lower-rise blocks of flats.40 But with land in the capital at a premium, where such estates exist it is surely a more economical solution to improve and rehabilitate than to demolish and redevelop (as the then prime minster David Cameron pledged to do in 2016 with 100 of the country’s worst so-called ‘sink’ estates). Missing from that debate was an appreciation of what the existing buildings could offer their disadvantaged residents if properly repaired and maintained, as well as a wider discussion of the fate of those residents if more expensive private housing were to take their place.41 The enduring popularity of surviving pockets of Victorian terraced and semi-detached housing in north Battersea, amidst its high-rise estates – for example in the Three Sisters Conservation and Shuttleworth Road areas – also suggests the opportunities that can arise from a combination of housing types and systems of tenure. Mixed density and diversity, and a range of choice in new housing, has been shown to provide benefits in terms of residents’ physical activity and health, particularly when integrated successfully within existing communities and street patterns. A blend of rows of small terraced housing and flats offers a good level of housing density, comparable to modern-day requirements at around 50 dwellings per hectare, and allows room for large, shared open spaces.42

Gentrification: problems and alternatives There is no doubt that south Battersea’s gentrification brought an upgrading of its Victorian housing stock and gradually transformed a depressed neighbourhood into one of London’s most sought-after and expensive residential districts. But such a process necessarily has its drawbacks. The increasing emphasis on owner-occupation and steeply rising house prices encouraged private landlords to sell up, greatly reducing the availability of rented housing and displacing large numbers of lower-paid skilled and manual workers who had always relied upon it, increasing 54

CHAPTER TWO COLIN THOM social division. The sociologist Ruth Glass, who first used the term ‘gentrification’ to describe the removal of the disadvantaged from districts of London to make way for better-off residents, warned as long ago as 1973 that, unlike American cities, with their poor central districts and ghettoes, the ‘real risk for Inner London is that it may well be gentrified with a vengeance, and be almost exclusively reserved for selected higher class strata’. Often regarded at the time as hyperbole, this view now seems remarkably prescient, given the current state of ‘supergentrification’, as well as the present government’s willingness to see expensive private housing spread through central London, and its increasing emphasis on the gentrification also of public housing estates – what has become known as ‘state-led gentrification’.43 The outcome in south Battersea has been to create an elite ‘ghetto’ of very wealthy (and mostly white) professional residents and to raise house prices to a level well beyond the reach of most Londoners. The average sale price today for a Victorian terraced house in the area between the commons is around £1.5m (or £3,000–£4,000 per month to rent). One solution for any remaining run-down areas of period housing stock in inner London would be a greater degree of local or central government involvement. Public acquisition or control over certain streets of housing of this kind might allow them to be made available to lower-paid or key workers for purchase or rent at below over-inflated market prices. In addition, shared-ownership schemes – currently popular with housing associations when it comes to marketing new-build estates – and part-buy/part-rent schemes could perhaps be broadened out to include upgraded older housing stock. The historic urban terraces of inner London should not be the preserve only of the rich.

Small builders, not big developers Today it is the big property developers, not local authorities, financial markets or architects – and certainly not local communities – who decide what happens in terms of building development in London. Developers now control huge swathes of the capital in a manner similar to the hereditary landed estates of the Georgian and Victorian eras – Lendlease in Elephant and Castle, for example, or Land Securities in Victoria – and the ugly, oversized changes they are making to the capital will be with us for a long time to come. Cash-strapped local councils, drained of planning expertise, have no power to stop them and no option but to take their so-called ‘planning gain’ levy to help pay for essential local services. And there is no guarantee that the majority of this type of new housing will even be occupied; much of it is acquired off-site simply as an investment. As the journalist Oliver Wainwright has pointed out, we are replacing homes with investment units, ‘silos of luxury safe-deposit boxes in the sky’.44 This new tendency is seen at its worst in Battersea (if not London) at Nine Elms , as part of the wholesale redevelopment of the so-called ‘Vauxhall Battersea Nine Elms Opportunity Area’, where a vast new zone (nearly 200 acres) of exclusive housing and commercial property is being created in a neglected, formerly industrial riverside district. Without any real public leadership, design and planning has once again been left to the developers themselves, with predictable results. Yet the example of Victorian Battersea shows what can be achieved in terms of an emergency supply of new housing by large numbers of small building firms and tradesmen, each of whom gained a modest share in the area’s growth. Instead of leaving all new house-building to the giant 55

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES development companies, with their dependence on standardised large-scale housing schemes, it might be better to encourage new partnerships between smaller, local builders and others – such as government bodies, long-term investors, or housing associations – and help them to work together on a variety of smaller scale, medium-sized residential schemes. Furthermore, a return to something akin to the Victorian leasehold system of development – perhaps effected by bringing land into public ownership and freeing the house-builders from the expense of land acquisition – might help kick-start a new phase of suburban development for those who are most in need of decent, affordable housing.45

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CHAPTER THREE RENEWABLE PRINCIPLES IN HENRY ASTLEY DARBISHIRE’S PEABODY ESTATES, 1864 TO 1885 IRINA DAVIDOVICI1

In the context of Victorian housing reform, the Peabody Trust, established in 1862, was among the first organisations to employ a professional architect. Between 1863 and 1885 Henry Astley Darbishire (1825–99) designed some 20 housing estates for the Trust, most of them in association with the same contractor, William Cubitt. Located throughout London in dense urban areas, often on sites reclaimed through slum clearance, these developments expressed the aim of housing the working classes as efficiently as possible, in conditions as hygienic as possible.2 Anonymous and pragmatic, they displayed the logic of a system – yet remained subject to adaptation, compromise, and mutation.

A FLAWED MODEL In their original configuration, the housing blocks were built in grey-yellow stock brick masonry and designed in a neutral Italianate style, then commonly used not only in residential but also in industrial architecture. The detached volumes allow views deep inside the plots, revealing rows of solid, stolid facades. Attempts to enliven the elevations with chromatic strips and terracotta trimmings at the base and top registers cannot counteract the powerful, repetitive effect of grids of identical windows set in deep white-painted reveals, their monotonous rhythm unperturbed by specific locations and orientations (Figure 3.1). This characteristic generated an ambivalent reception for the early Peabody Estates, which persisted long after their completion. The contrast between generosity of intent and the poverty of architectural means was already remarked upon by an American visitor to the Islington Estate in the late 1860s: ‘There were flowers in the windows, and bright, happy faces looking out from among them; but the blocks had a prison-like appearance, nevertheless.’3 In 1887, the Daily News complained that Darbishire’s projects looked ‘too much as barracks or workhouses, and too little like dwellings’, asking: ‘Why do the [Peabody] Trustees persist in adding to the ugliness of London? They can well afford to give the buildings better windows, and to spend something, if not on ornament, at least on getting designs which should make their buildings pleasant to the eye as well as good for health and comfort.’4 This opinion persisted with even their staunchest chronicler, the academic John Nelson Tarn, admitting to their ‘heavy, ponderous style’, planned with a ‘weakness of imagination or ingenuity’.5 Nikolaus Pevsner, overall critical of what he called ‘the uncharitable look of charitable architecture,’6 reserved particularly waspish comments for 57

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES Darbishire’s contributions to the type. He singled out the Peabody Square in Islington (1865) as a ‘crushingly unattractive, vaguely Italianate type which became standard for future Peabody Estates’,7 describing other developments as ‘gloomy and barrack-like’ (Spitalfields),8 ‘familiar but none the less detestable’ (Old Pye Street),9 ‘working-class housing at [its] most depressing’,10 ‘ever repeated design … at its worst and in an all too familiar form’ (Wild Street).11 Pevsner’s remarks inadvertently reveal the most positive attribute of Darbishire’s estates: a familiarity achieved through repetition. Their formal and material cohesion renders them recognisable and somehow equivalent, like members of the same clan turning up in Bloomsbury or Islington, Covent Garden or Shadwell, Clerkenwell or Southwark. Despite their unassuming formal vocabulary and discrete, often concealed, locations, they exude urbanity. A reliable component of London’s background architecture, their standardisation gives visual expression to the concept of urban density and remains open to modifications. In contrast to their limited expressive palette, a closer look at Darbishire’s estates yields a variety of details and urban configurations, arising from topographical and morphological exceptions.

FIGURE 3.1, ABOVE HA Darbishire, Peabody Shadwell Estate, 1866. The internal courtyard, c.1900. 58

Shared formal characteristics convey a sense of urban cohesion that is reinforced by continuity of inhabitation. Affordability and an almost exclusive residential use have meant the estates have enjoyed stable levels of occupancy and popularity. Seemingly resistant to price fluctuations and urban gentrification, over the years they have attracted tenants of modest and moderate means, some of whom have lived in the same premises their entire lives. The central administration of the Trust – its ownership in the main unaffected by Right to Buy policies – still ensures a relative parity across the sites. As a result, Peabody estates appear as islands of consistency and continuity, set apart from the accelerated changes that affect their surrounds. In contrast to many Modernist housing developments, they have a grammar of repetitive elements that does not result in disorientation and loss of identity; their simple but solid construction accepts patina and weathering, bearing signs of wear and tear reasonably well (Figure 3.2). Their plain longevity serves as a useful counterpoint for assessing the majority of recent London residential developments, in which a pressing need for housing seems to have been conflated with a marketgenerated, frantic demand for profitable spectacle.

CHAPTER THREE IRINA DAVIDOVICI In comparison to the urban heterogeneity, poor construction and fast dilapidation of these developments, Darbishire’s basic template stands as a model of endurance, stability and adaptability. Despite their dour austerity, the historical and architectural value of Victorian Peabody estates has been widely acknowledged with the award of Grade II and Conservation Area listings. More interesting still, in the context of this publication, is their relevance for new design strategies in the provision of housing. This chapter examines the extent to which Darbishire’s initial model might serve as a reference for new developments outside its historical framework. To address this question it is necessary to go beyond formal attributes to issues that range from the social, moral and iconographic programme that underlined Darbishire’s designs to construction and procurement. What is the continued relevance of the oldest Peabody estates in terms of urban attributes and typological standards? What is their impact on the fabric of London as a townscape proposition? Is a replication of Darbishire’s standard block desirable or even possible in the current situation?

MEANINGS AND SUBTEXTS The Peabody Trust was set up to address the social consequences of London’s heavy industrialisation during the nineteenth century. Accelerated urban growth and rural immigration, the lack of accommodation near workplaces, and the displacements caused by railway construction all contributed to horrendous living conditions among the poorer classes. Public health concerns were raised during the 1830s, after cholera and typhoid outbreaks repeatedly spread beyond the urban quarters of the poor. Political reactions followed, with Edwin Chadwick’s report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1843) bringing a statutory framework for controlled development and new regulations affecting the ventilation, hygiene, water supply and sanitation of streets, courtyards and properties. Whilst housing reform provided only a small number of dwellings, it stirred significant debates, leading to changes in legislation and to the creation of valuable prototypes for high-density urban housing. FIGURE 3.2, ABOVE Peabody Clerkenwell Estate, 1884. One of the more picturesque estates on account of topographical variations, 2014 .

Model housing had been around since the late 1840s, one of the most important examples being the ‘Model Houses for Families’ 59

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES (1850) in Streatham Street, Bloomsbury, designed by Henry Roberts for The Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes. A U-shaped, five-storey block arranged around an internal yard, it featured self-contained flats accessed through open galleries, but its generous specifications were seen as economically unsustainable. Another branch of reform housing was achieved through private ventures animated by the spirit of evangelical conscience; Columbia Square in Bethnal Green (1859–62), commissioned by Angela Burdett-Coutts at the instigation of Charles Dickens, indicated the didactic substrate of improved dwellings as a means towards educating the inhabitants.12 One thousand people were housed in its four five-storey blocks, built in an austere Gothic style with minimal ornament, seemingly intent on discouraging all leisurely pursuit.13 The ensemble was designed by Henry Darbishire and became a precedent for his subsequent Peabody estates, which adopted the same urban configuration of blocks around a square, the provision of open staircases and symmetrical corridor plans. Reformed housing efforts in London targeted the problem areas indicated in the Maps Descriptive of London Poverty published by Charles Booth in the 1880s and 1890s. In the system of colour coding, Booth’s maps categorised residential areas according to a peculiar matrix of class, income and social respectability. Columbia Square and the subsequent Peabody estates were located in or near the infamous black areas labelled ‘Lower class – vicious, semi-criminal.’ It comes as little surprise then that they displayed the tight-lipped architectural severity otherwise common to prisons, army barracks and workhouses. Preventive rather than redemptive, shelter was reserved for the ‘deserving’ poor able to demonstrate a certain respectability by means of a regular income. Reform housing aimed to protect working people and their families from insalubrious surroundings and thus to expose them, as Darbishire so bluntly put it, only to those ‘neighbours whose habits and appearance are superior to their own’.14 In offering an alternative to the slums, Victorian working-class housing represented an ambitious project of social engineering, conducted by the bourgeois classes in order to control the working force. Robin Evans has seen the introduction of corridors and thresholds in reform housing as being instrumental in this process.15 The separations of individuals within the family and of families within the community were already inscribed into the plan of model dwellings that Roberts had designed for the Great Exhibition in 1851, with their provision of one-family flats separating living and sleeping quarters.16 In contrast to the indeterminate space of the slum, where, as Friedrich Engels put it at the time, ‘no doors are needed, there being nothing to steal’,17 the new way of life was unprecedented in its compartmentalisation. What was indisputably an improvement by modern yardsticks such as hygiene, privacy and functional determinacy constituted at the same time a loss of commonality and a restriction of individual freedom. Darbishire, early in his Peabody career, was already aware of this equivocal exchange: ‘If a labouring man be taken away from one low small room in which he has been accustomed to live with his wife and four or five small children, and be placed in a dwelling which he cannot afford to furnish or keep clean, and where he is not comfortable and at ease, he will consider himself badly treated, and wish that he had been left alone. No symmetrical or beautiful building will ever 60

CHAPTER THREE IRINA DAVIDOVICI compensate him for the loss of a cabin which was convenient to him, and where he felt himself at home.’18 The emergence of inner-city housing estates as ensembles of multi-storey buildings was not only a response to economic necessities or public health concerns, but openly embodied the principles of capitalist society. Their size required considerable capital investment, with the centralised design of dwellings as identical, repeated units lowering construction costs and increasing returns on the premium urban land they occupied. At the same time, they represented a privatisation of domestic space, the reorganisation of free flowing, chaotic communities into ordered, separate, salubrious family units in multi-level residences. The estates did not represent the emergence of a building type; after all, urban multi-storey living was not a nineteenth-century invention. Their administrative entity, however, with family dwellings stacked on top of each other like manufactured goods on a factory shelf, represented an entirely new conception of urban and social order. The bulky sobriety of Darbishire’s housing estates is therefore programmatic of a typically Victorian mixture of philanthropy and pragmatism. In March 1862, The Times announced the gift of the American investment banker and long-term London resident George Peabody (1795– 1869) of £150,000 to benefit ‘the poor and needy of this great metropolis and to promote their comfort and happiness’.19 For its administration, Peabody appointed five trustees from among business partners and political figures of the day.20 Rejecting a religious or political agenda, the donation was rather intended to benefit Londoners (‘by birth or residence’) who could demonstrate ‘moral character and good conduct as a member of society.’21 The trustees set up the self-perpetuating clause that accounts for the Peabody Trust’s continued survival until today. For the purpose of perpetuity a return rate of a minimum 3% was set on all investment, well below the 5% rate common at the time.22 At Lord Shaftesbury’s suggestion, Peabody recommended his trustees ‘to apply the fund, or a portion of it, in the construction of such improved dwellings for the poor as may combine in the utmost possible degree the essentials of healthfulness, comfort, social enjoyment and economy’.23 Later Peabody increased his donation more than threefold, so that after his death in 1869 the total capital reached £500,000. While intent on providing housing, the Peabody trustees did not encourage experiments with ideal prototypes; like other philanthropic organisations they required guaranteed returns. Building estimates did not cover the cost of cleared sites so the trustees had to keep the predictable costs stable, in order to establish what they could afford to pay for the sites. Their strategy was therefore dependent on a simple, hygienic and commercially sustainable architecture that could be replicated upon as many sites as possible.

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NORMS Little information survives about Henry Astley Darbishire, the Trust’s first and most prolific architect. Of Mancunian origin , he qualified as an RIBA Fellow in 1856 and retired from practice in 1894, most of his projects having been completed in the employment of the Peabody Trust and under the patronage of Baroness Burdett-Coutts.24 A small number of public lectures – mostly on the subject of housing for the poor – bear testament to his pragmatic, conscientious nature, ease with numbers and an admiration, unusual in its time, for utilitarian and humble typologies. Darbishire’s designs for the Peabody Trust corroborate these assumptions: mostly plain and repetitive, they ostensibly sought the most efficient way of providing salubrious shelter for uneducated, poor and transient working-class families. No original drawings of his housing schemes have been preserved, which may partly be explained by his declared mistrust of architectural drawings as ‘the most illusive and discouraging of all the rewards allotted to persevering labour.’25 Moreover, his working with the same contractor whilst using largely the same details for over 20 years probably reduced the need for drawings to a minimum. Rather, the aesthetic aspects of the design process were supplanted by a fascination with numerical data (costs, returns, numbers of accommodation units). The adoption of capital-based economic principles subjected Darbishire’s designs to a process of rationalisation, not unlike a manufacturing process. Small family apartments, with shared sanitary and laundry facilities, were organised into rectangular blocks of four to six storeys, spaced apart to allow ventilation and arranged around semi-private squares where children could play safely. The basic unit of this model combined a set of private rooms with shared access to communal facilities – a formula articulated by the end of 1863 and reapplied for the next thirty years: ‘A poor man’s town dwelling should consist of a living-room and bed-room, with provision for additional bed-rooms when required; that it should possess a plentiful and accessible supply of water both for ablution and cooking; a W.C., sink, and lavatory distinct, but not far removed from his tenement; a wash-house, with the means of drying clothes in any weather without artificial heat; and, lastly, when practicable, a play-ground for his children.’26 Stylistic considerations, if not altogether dispensed with, were clearly subordinated to pragmatic ones, creating a system capable of compromise and mutation. The provision of one- to threeroom flats enabled tenants to remain on the same estate as their family needs changed, which benefitted individuals and community alike: ‘The ability to increase his house-room without having to leave the building in which he first established himself is found to act as a strong inducement to him to remain in one locality and identify himself with it and his fellow-tenants. This all tends to increase his self-respect and creates a feeling of attachment to his home, which is not only beneficial to himself, but has a good influence on those with whom he is associated.’27 Darbishire’s residential system evolved over a number of projects. The first Peabody development, built in 1864 on a small triangular site in Spitalfields, was the least typical of the series, a V-shaped corner building with mixed residential and commercial uses. Private rooms or flats were accessed along a long central corridor, with sculleries and lavatories at either end. While Islington and subsequent estates retained this internal planning (Figure 3.3), their urban 62

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layout and appearance changed when the Trust began purchasing cleared sites, larger in size and more regular in shape. Darbishire expressed his preference in the design of working-class dwellings for ‘rooms of a regular shape [which] are more easily kept clean, are less expensive to furnish … and much more capable of being made comfortable.’28 The same regulating principle guided his customary planning of long, rectilinear blocks. The Peabody Square in Islington established the urban morphology that Darbishire would use from the mid-1860s onwards. On a large plot obtained through slum clearance, four detached five-storey blocks faced inwards towards a central square. The top, laundry floor was expressed as a series of unglazed narrow openings separated by pilasters. Below them spread a regular matrix of identical sash windows, with gently arched brick lintels. The central staircase appeared on the street facade as a narrow open arch, four storeys high; sculleries with smaller windows were placed in recesses at both ends. Accessed from inside the courtyard, the blocks turned their backs on the neighbourhood – an impression reinforced by the ensemble being raised above the street and enclosed with railings. A contemporary engraving shows Peabody Square as an island of order and light, surrounded by murky terrace houses and narrow dark backyards (Figure 3.4). Against a background of shadows and pestilent fogs, the sharply delineated, well-lit blocks enclose a populous square, neatly accentuated by the clock tower in the middle. Liberties have been taken with the proportion and scale of the buildings, the details (the clock was never built) and even lighting (the sun shines only on the estate) in order to convey the estate as a clearing in the blackened mass of the city. This manipulated representation reflected not only reformist ideals (as demonstrated by the Trust policy), but class prejudices within the working class itself. Darbishire commented on the existence of a social hierarchy among the poor, most probably based on the regularity and size of income, but expressed in terms of respectability:

FIGURE 3.3, ABOVE Peabody Square, Islington, 1865. Typical block plan with corridor access.

‘Strong class prejudices … are widely diffused through all sections of the poor … Those who consider that their wages entitled them to a superiority, which their poorer fellow-workers cannot claim, will not compromise their dignity by any condescension towards familiarity, and hold themselves aloof … and these in turn, though they may resent this exclusiveness, acknowledge their disadvantage, and do not care to leave the retirement that shelters their poverty.’29 63

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The Islington estate replaced Ward’s Place, infamous for housing a ‘dense population of the worst character of the metropolis’.30 As this demographic persisted all around it, segregation was considered a natural course of action by landlords and tenants alike. Both in their design and day-to-day running, Peabody estates determined their own limited, controllable reality. The resident superintendent played a polyvalent role that extended beyond the cleaning, maintenance and management of public areas to conflict resolution, keeping tabs on drunkenness and bad behaviour, and serving notice whenever these recurred. Sub-letting was strictly prohibited and any home improvements affecting the building fabric were considered property damage. The emphasis on social responsibility had a clear impact on the quality of life within the estate, which was sufficiently regulated as to discourage the intrusion of less ‘respectable’ characters.

FIGURE 3. 4, ABOVE Peabody Square, Islington, 1865. Period print showing the estate as a distinct entity from the surrounding neighbourhood. 64

Overall, Darbishire’s standard designs were influenced by the internal organisation of Roberts’ model dwellings, especially in the more compact plan he would use from the early 1870s onwards. In contrast to Roberts’ advocacy of self-contained flats, however, the Peabody Trust adopted the ‘associated dwellings’ policy, with water facilities placed in the common areas. The complexity of installation and maintenance of private bathrooms would have increased both building costs and rents, but in any case Darbishire believed that ‘it would still be undesirable to supply the poor with conveniences which are seldom found, even in the … chambers of the better educated’.31 Common facilities in a shared environment, placed safely apart from bedrooms and kitchens and easily accessible for maintenance, were seen as more hygienic, secure, and of

CHAPTER THREE IRINA DAVIDOVICI greater educational value: ‘by degrees the wasteful habits of the tenants came to be influenced by their improved position, and an increased acquaintance with the ways of decent living made them more economical.’32 The associated dwellings policy, justified on health and moral grounds, was abandoned in the twentieth century, when the old flats were fitted with kitchens and bathrooms, and the common lavatories and laundries converted to residential use.33 Other aspects of Darbishire’s designs had similarly corrective subtexts, as to ‘lead to the gradual abandonment of injurious habits, and give no sudden offence to jealously cherished prejudices’.34 Internal finishes were chosen primarily for considerations of hygiene and wear: painted walls, plastered ceilings, wooden floors, tiling in wet areas. Wallpaper was banned, not only for harbouring vermin but also with a view to expedient renovation for new occupants; nailing pictures onto walls or any kind of modifications to surfaces or layout were prohibited. Such pragmatic considerations were rooted in an austere paternalism, counteracting the nominal ‘poor’ man’s tendencies to ‘bring creepers in his home’ and ‘surround himself with pictures whenever he has the opportunity’. By today’s standards, an inordinate amount of thought went into the issue of ventilation: ‘if there is anything in the world that a poor man hates’, Darbishire noted, ‘or a poor man’s children are educated to hate, with cordial, sincere and unquenchable hatred, it is fresh air’.35 In response, he recommended hidden ventilation means at every scale of the design, from the separation of the residential blocks and the open staircases to wall vents, intentionally loose-fitting doors and windows, and doors strategically placed as to create healthy draughts. A significant factor in the architectural evaluation of Darbishire’s estates lies with their constructive aspects. Most of them were built simply and well, with a kind of brute finality, by the same contractor, William Cubitt and Co. With the exception of Bermondsey, where in 1875 the architect experimented briefly and unsuccessfully with concrete block construction, all others were built in brick, with some terracotta accents (Figure 3.5).36 These materials were associated with a sense of solidity, permanence and building quality, rather than innovation or originality: ‘There is but little to remark on the construction of the buildings. The materials employed are simple and of the best description … All the walls and the partitions between the rooms are brick. The external walls are of picked stocks, relieved at intervals with flush bands of hard Suffolks. The external angles [to first-floor height], and the dressings of the principal entrance doorway, are of extremely hard terracotta.’37 Materials and details were as serialised as the general layouts: the cornice in Suffolk bricks, alternatively plain and bevelled, under cast iron gutters and Bangor slate roofs. Internally, timber floors were specified for flats, concrete or stone for the corridors. Partitions, originally in fair-faced painted brickwork, were later finished in Portland cement.38 Just as the internal finishes would suit the manner of use appropriate to the tenants’ social status, so on the exterior the juxtaposition of stock brick, white brick and terracotta had a representational content. Three detached blocks added to the Pimlico Estate in 1885–7, were ornately clad in terracotta detailing, which made them look more like urban palazzi than associated dwellings. At Islington, vents to the top floor laundry spaces, later removed, were expressed as ornamental turrets rising from the middle of the roof. Such details were usually grafted on monolithic, repetitive and on the whole undifferentiated blocks that, typologically and morphologically speaking, seemed closer to industrial architecture. 65

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VARIATIONS The urban model established in Islington, with detached blocks grouped around a square, would remain Darbishire’s default planning model. His designs evolved in terms of internal organisation, which in time would also affect the general layout. In the earlier projects, as at Islington, the rooms were accessed from long central corridors, with shared lavatories and sculleries at the ends. The staircase in the middle of each plan was naturally ventilated and common laundries placed on the top floor, with unglazed openings to assist drying.39 Not surprisingly this caused cold draughts, and Darbishire, acting on tenants’ feedback, later removed the spine corridor at the Blackfriars Road Estate (1871). A more compact plan emerged, with five flats and lavatories on each floor being accessed directly from the staircase (Figure 3.6). Within this layout, another variation was explored in Pimlico (1876), where a smaller laundry replaced the fifth flat on each floor, thus removing, along with the top-floor common laundry, the cause of much neighbourly contention. At several estates, including two of the densest, Abbey Orchard and Wild Street (both 1882), the laundry rooms project outwards as bay windows and impose a vertical rhythm on the street facades. The shorter block modules that resulted from removing the access corridors had a strong impact on the planning of subsequent estates. They could now abut sideways two by two, be grouped in long rows, spaced apart or crammed in any crevices of the plot. From this point on, Darbishire was able to arrange blocks as best dictated by each site in order to obtain the required density. In response to the long narrow site at Peabody Avenue in Pimlico (1876) he provided two continuous rows, each of 13 blocks – an arrangement more similar to the surrounding street pattern than to the preceding urban squares (Figure 3.7). If for John Nelson Tarn the result was the ‘most monotonous of the Peabody Estates’, the relentless pursuit of modular repetition also makes it one of the most radical.40 Such variations bear witness to the adaptability of Darbishire’s module to a variety of heights and configurations, shapes, topographies and orientations.

FIGURE 3.5, ABOVE Peabody Avenue, Pimlico, 1876. Corner detail showing London stock brick, Suffolk brick and terracotta construction. 66

Darbishire’s method comprised a balancing act between expenses and returns, overall density, number and size of dwelling units. The repeated application of the same principles and the opportunity to improve them through trial and error

CHAPTER THREE IRINA DAVIDOVICI gave rise to a system of serialised blocks, whose construction costs and rent returns were known in advance. As Tarn observed, ‘It was thus only necessary to juggle ingeniously with a series of standard blocks until the necessary accommodation was obtained; [and] merely a matter of simple arithmetic to equate the amount of accommodation necessary to produce the required return with the known cost of building; and it was by this means that the Trustees had first arrived at the price they could afford to pay for the cleared sites.’41 Development of this level of standardisation between 1865 and 1875 had a great impact on the Trust’s scale of operations for the following decade. At this time, with the support of the Metropolitan Board of Works, the Peabody Trust became single-handedly responsible for the largest ‘quasi-public body of subsidised housing’ before the London County Council was established in 1889.42 Between 1860 and 1880 it had become increasingly hard to find new sites for construction, especially in central London. With the Artisans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Improvement Act (1875), the Metropolitan Board of Works was empowered to conduct the compulsory purchase and clearance of existing slums, but market prices dictated that the sites thus made available for auction were far too expensive for regular commercial investments. The added statutory proviso that at least as many occupants should be re-housed as previously displaced proved to be a serious constraint.

FIGURE 3.6, ABOVE , TOP Peabody Square, Blackfriars, 1871. Typical block plan with staircase access. Note the compact arrangement and superior, more generous room layout. FIGURE 3. 7, ABOVE, BOTTOM Peabody Avenue, Pimlico, 1876. Looking north in 1968.

All these conditions placed the Peabody Trust in a unique position to operate at a greater scale than ever before. When the first cleared site, at Whitechapel, failed to sell at auction, the Trust offered to buy it along with five other sites for £120,000 – a considerable portion of its funds, but a fraction of the total market value. Thus the Metropolitan Board of Works and the Trust entered a strained arrangement, the former to sell below the asking price, indirectly subsidising the construction with public money, the latter to raise the capital needed for development, by borrowing a further £300,000 from the Bank of England. Overall, ten sites were acquired in part or in whole under the Act between 1881 and 1885.43 For the Peabody Trust, this period was characterised by pressure. Financially, the sustained effort exhausted its funds and stopped it from investing in new developments until its 67

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES sphere of operation was effectively overtaken by the London County Council in the 1890s. The statutory demand for high densities resulted in the grim, taut consistency of later estates, a formal hardness in which considerations of comfort and spatial generosity were further reduced, and which stretched Darbishire’s modular system, standard block and constrained design palette beyond limit. This intensity led to serious compromises, such as the fatal crowding of blocks and a height increase to six floors in Wild Street, and explains the typological anomalies at Abbey Orchard Estate, where corners are fused to create U-shaped blocks (Figure 3.8). And yet, although Darbishire had to review his approaches to ventilation and hygiene, the system he had devised survived. No matter how rigidly it had been set up, and how little trustees and architect were inclined towards variations, its strict rationalisation maintained a capacity for adjustment.

SIDE EFFECTS Darbishire’s standard block arrangement creates an unintentional side effect: seen from the street, the open corners of the squares undermine the relentless solidity of their facades. The view penetrates into the depth of the site, where it is eventually closed off by another identical facade. In a city of closed fronts and terraces, this layered view is unusual, creating an intense sensation of urbanity (Figure 9). The abstract, quantitative notion of density is given here a visible, qualitative expression, although it is more than likely – given the awkward planning and the time when these estates were designed – that this picturesque effect of depth and density was unintentional. The quality of the urban space did not enter Darbishire’s considerations: the city was an enemy to be vanquished, or at least controlled.44

FIGURE 3.8, ABOVE Peabody Abbey Orchard Street Estate, Westminster (1882) in 1954. Statutory density requirements imposed an additional sixth storey and the abandonment of open ventilated corners. 68

In terms of appearance, the Victorian Peabody estates had to perform an uneasy balancing act between lending dignity to working class environments and reinforcing established class hierarchies. The stylistic progression from the Gothic of Darbishire’s earlier projects to the austere Italianate of the Peabody blocks had a special significance: suitably ambivalent, the style was rooted partly in the residential palaces of the superior classes, but also in a modern tradition imparting decorum to utilitarian and industrial structures. Since the second half of the eighteenth century, classical features had increasingly been deployed on industrial buildings, whose

CHAPTER THREE IRINA DAVIDOVICI ordered, rational appearance signified the newly rationalised production processes.45 Housing working-class families in factory-like buildings seems too literal an interpretation, but as both houses and factories were products of parallel processes of capital concentration and centralisation, the connection is practical rather than symbolic. Industrial references offer a clue to one of the Peabody Estates’ most characteristic motifs – the use of coloured brick strings to break up large and repetitive facades. Between the 1850s and 1870s, structural polychromy had emerged in High Victorian Gothic in an exuberant phase of ecclesiastic and secular architecture.46 The use of coloured bricks to convey force, dynamism and heightened material effect filtered to industrial architecture, although here, due to matters of scale and proportion, it fulfilled a different role. At Rylands & Sons’ Gidlow Mills in Wigan (1865), by George Woodhouse, the polychromy created a strong horizontal rhythm. This building probably caught Darbishire’s eye, for he refers to an unspecified similar structure in his paper of the same year, ‘A Few Suggestions on the Introduction of Coloured Bricks, etc., in Elevations’. Here the architect abandoned his specialised topic of working-class housing to address the aesthetic aspects of design, revealing in the process a sharp eye for everyday environments. His description of a large industrial mill, glimpsed from the train, recalls Rylands Mill and is consistent with its position near the railway line: ‘There is a really grand mill near Wigan, in Lancashire, which I never pass with indifference, where coloured bricks have served the purposes of its designer well. They define its main proportions; they maintain its leading lines; they give variety to its long flat walls; they confer importance upon its almost countless openings; and they dispose themselves so as to create bold, rich and most effective details; in short, they do all that coloured bricks ought to do, and nothing more … The vast dimensions of the building, the unbroken character of its leading lines, the regularity of its openings and wall spaces, and the simplicity of its requirements in matters of detail and ornament, all help to save it from the mistakes and incongruities which deface the “villa residence” in its vicinity.’47

FIGURE 3.9, ABOVE Peabody Square, Islington, 1865. The repetitive effect of blocks within the depth of the site, 2014.

Darbishire sought a similar effect on the Peabody scheme for Islington. The preceding Columbia Square and Spitalfields developments had been closer to Henry Roberts’ ‘Model Houses for Families’ in Streatham Street, where a rustication 69

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES effect was achieved by recessing every fifth course of the reddish brown brick. The adoption, at Islington, of yellow stock brick and flush strings of light-coloured Suffolk brick on the lower levels, approximating a rusticated base, was extended in some form or another to all subsequent estates designed by Darbishire. It became their signature characteristic. There is however more to read in the affinity between Peabody estates and industrial structures. Both command a visceral reaction that is hard to define with any precision – a primeval response to their scale, mass and material structure, to the repetition of identical elements on large surfaces, to the visual effect of layered surfaces. Since the early nineteenth century, the vision of factories as huge repeated surfaces of serialised windows, up to nine storeys high, shrouded in the smoke of their own chimneys, has yielded a strange attraction. It is sufficient to recall Friedrich Schinkel’s reaction to the Ancoats mills, which left, during his English tour of 1826, ‘a dreadful and dismal impression: monstrous shapeless buildings put up only by foremen without architecture’.48 These descriptive terms were associated with the eighteenth-century notion of the sublime, the experience of things beyond our ‘perceptual and imaginative grasp’.49 Indeed, connections were later made between the aesthetic appreciation of utilitarian structures and notions of the sublime in architecture. Edgar Jones described the Sedgewick Mill in Ancoats (1818–20) as possessing a ‘sublimity emphasised by its awesome size, virtual absence of decoration, universal use of tough red brick and regular arrangement of windows’.50 By the same criteria, the forbidding and repetitive appearance of Darbishire’s denser estates commands a powerful response. Despite his emphasis on light and air, these estates were darker and starker, creating ever larger surfaces articulated by the rhythmic rows of windows. The strong materiality of ensembles pertains to the repetitiveness of construction – often the case with brick structures over a certain dimension. The bareness and implied ‘privation’ of the darker, grimmer estates impresses the viewer far more than the comfortable yellow light and plant boxes of the more prosperous ones. Yet the strongest association between the early estates designed by Darbishire and industrial production is not visible but implicit: both speak of the same masses of people involved in manufacture. Home and factory – the one housing them at night, the other helping them earn their daily bread – are subject to the currents of capital and demand. The early Peabody estates are more an emanation of the nineteenth-century industrialised city than of any aesthetic agenda. One can already perceive in them an early Modernist preoccupation with mass production and mass housing, rendered efficient through the serialisation of elements. Through his systematic, practical approach Darbishire anticipated the Modernist preoccupation with Typisierung or typification, the creation of normative forms over and above creative individuality. The Peabody estates gave truthful expression to the productive processes that shaped their society, which accounts for their integrity – preserved for over 150 years.

A MODEL FOR CONTEMPORARY HOUSING? Compared to much of today’s housing, the longevity of Darbishire’s Peabody estates seems all the more remarkable. Some of the estates have changed considerably on account of maturing trees, refurbishments and landscaping, bearing the mark not only of administrative responsibility but, unmistakably, of individual gestures of inhabitation. Others, more barren and closer to the 70

CHAPTER THREE IRINA DAVIDOVICI original state, where occupancy feels denser and the community spirit more muted, still exude an austere sense of urbanity, a dispassionate abstract character that demands a less conventional evaluation. They all share a dependably urban atmosphere, with which they manage the difficult balancing act between capitalist densification and communal living. The question remains how this modest yet reliable contribution to the cultural imagery of the industrial city may be relevant for contemporary housing design. We can safely assume that the architectural and urban qualities of Darbishire’s model are partly unintentional, the consequence of a pragmatic modus operandi. Its more picturesque features are the results of irregular site configurations, topographical features and subsequent purchases of adjacent lots, such as the sloping, additive plot of the Peabody Estate in Clerkenwell. Even the statutory impositions of the 1875 Act, with its imprudent drive for densification, resulted in morphological variations that add a personal note to the Abbey Orchard Street and Covent Garden Estates. The impact of the continued inhabitation of generations of tenants is palpable in the private landscaping of some of the more prosperous estates in Blackfriars, Covent Garden and Pimlico. However, most of the character of Victorian Peabody estates developed over time, their current charm the result of weathering, mature trees and communal gardens, continued works of maintenance, modernisation and conservation. Even though the polychromatic brick and terracotta details sought to impart a degree of dignity on all estates, Darbishire’s essential target was clearly standardisation. Nowadays the creation of a similar standard block type that could be erected on any available site with minimal variations and, as much as possible, with advance knowledge of the cost, seems unthinkable. According to architect and housing developer Claire Bennie, who worked for the Peabody Trust between 2004 and 2015, the most important impediment lies with planning and site constraints that did not exist in the nineteenth century.51 It is difficult to imagine today the same housing layouts, plans or details being applied repeatedly, independently of the specific urban contexts in which they occur: issues of overlooking and rights of light, the setting out of services and connection to public infrastructures would impact on the layout. With public health crises a distant memory, contemporary designers are under pressure to maximise land use, re-creating the closed frontages and inner courtyards of conventional perimeter solutions. Finally, the lack of land in central locations precludes the possibility of developments of a similar size, no matter how dense. In theory, the lasting association of architect Darbishire and contractor Cubitt under the umbrella of the Peabody Trust could be replicated: some housing providers have their own in-house contractors, or prefer repeated collaborations with certain architects. In practice, however, the twenty-first century building industry and product market are now too different to guarantee the stability of prices or the same quality of construction across several sites, especially in the absence of real possibilities for multiple repeat orders. In terms of budget and procurement, stable predictable building costs depended on standardisation on a scale that is no longer conceivable. Setting aside the deplorable impact of prefabrication on housing environments in the second half of the twentieth century, the factory production of elements depends on demand for quantities that could be difficult to achieve. In today’s comprehensively regulated construction industry, the cost of labour cannot be compared to the cheap workforce available in the late nineteenth century in the absence of any 71

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES work benefits, health and safety provisions. Better protection of employees does not however fully account for the high costs of UK construction: the risk aversion of the building industry and the demand for assured budget and time limits have an impact on the contracts’ price tag. So does the plumped-up procurement structure, in which project managers increasingly take over the architects’ traditional site co-ordination and supervision responsibilities. The application of the Fordist system to the construction industry – transforming the role of the main contractor from builder to manager – has eroded the sense of personal responsibility or artisan pride once attached to the well-executed artefact. Yet, despite technological and managerial advances, the act of construction still comes with risks attached. The correct and humdrum tone of the recorded correspondence on the maintenance of the nineteenth-century Peabody portfolio, conducted through the Trust’s Secretary John Crouch, will sound strangely familiar to the contemporary architect.52 But in the absence of an original Darbishire archive with his own drawings and documents, one can only speculate about his precise involvement on site and relation to the contractor Cubitt. Given the low esteem in which Darbishire held architectural drawing,53 the lack of construction documentation might indicate a degree of informality, corroborated by the repeated designs and rationalised approach to planning. In contrast, the excessive cautiousness of today’s highly mediated construction processes cuts both ways: while upholding standards and helping control potential abuses, it adds a considerable amount of bureaucracy which in turn boosts costs. Despite their simple construction, the solidity and endurance of Darbishire’s buildings relied on techniques and craft skills that by today’s standards appear anachronistic. In economic and environmental terms, it seems increasingly difficult to envisage such load-bearing masonry constructions making a comeback. On the other hand, the construction systems and materials commonly favoured by contemporary contractors and developers will most often not provide housing of an equivalent longevity – certainly not without significant maintenance and refurbishment costs. It requires a change of culture and the combined efforts of developer-clients and architects to acknowledge that more expensive but higher-quality, lasting construction represents a better investment in the longer term. The rendered insulation, timber boarding and flimsy cladding systems so popular in London’s recent housing developments provide at best a scenography of homeliness. Designers and clients need to consider not only issues of urban consistency – how housing relates to the existing fabric – but also of durability and maintenance: the lifespan and appearance of their projects 20, 50 or 100 years from now. Having continued to commission, acquire and provide affordable housing for over 150 years, the Peabody Trust portfolio has become a marker in London’s housing histories. Ellis Woodman has noted a renewed preference in its recent commissions for brick masonry, perceptible in developments by Haworth Tompkins, Pitman Tozer and most recently Niall McLaughlin Architects (NMA).54 This last project, aptly named Darbishire Place (2015), is located on the Whitechapel Peabody Estate and represents the Peabody Trust’s highest profile development in recent years. Completed by Darbishire in 1881, the historical ensemble displays the usual five-storey detached blocks laid out around a rectangular square, built in yellow brick, with regular windows set within deep, white-painted reveals. The denser initial configuration was transformed following bombing during the Second World War, when one of the blocks was destroyed. Built on a resulting vacant plot, the new building completes the original square and thus represents a typical condition of contemporary housing, the urban infill. 72

CHAPTER THREE IRINA DAVIDOVICI Even as a one-off piece, NMA’s architectural response to this context constitutes the most direct transposition of Darbishire’s standard block to date. Taking cues from the Victorian neighbours, the volume, materiality and repeated facade physiognomy are determined by the original ensemble, while the larger windows, generous internal layouts and balconies integrated within the building envelope bring the project up to date. Although the construction is unpretentious, there is no question here of standardisation or serialisation. The use of brick is not an a priori stipulation on the part of the Trust, but the architects’ reaction to the site. Unlike Darbishire’s simple, extruded plans, variations occur here with different layouts on the first floor, where two larger flats are provided, and on the upper floors, each of which has three smaller flats, in answer to current housing market demand. The detailing of openings refers directly to the Victorian blocks, with white precast concrete elements replacing terracotta and the angled recesses of windows and balconies to the original, white-painted reveals. This is not so much a contemporary interpretation of the original Peabody standard, however, as a response to the specific situation of the Whitechapel estate today. The abandonment of symmetry clearly signals a distance from Darbishire’s default solution. The building steps back and narrows down at its south end, in a new articulation of the originally blunt open corner situation. In a sensitive take on Darbishire’s system, this gesture replicates with just one building the visual layering of several facades, conveying the effect of density and urbanity characteristic of the original estates (Figure 3.10). Darbishire Place puts several things right. Its naming gives much deserved recognition to the little-known Victorian architect who defined the urban imagery and public image of the Peabody Trust’s oldest estates without leaving a strong individual imprint on its designs. In architectural terms the building achieves something similar, negotiating between a standard that was a necessity in Victorian times and a unique artefact that signals the potential of contemporary housing design. FIGURE 3.10, ABOVE Niall McLaughlin Architects. Darbishire Place (2015) located on the Peabody Estate Whitechapel, 1881. The building’s materiality replicates the original construction. The external envelope is manipulated to replicate the same effect of repeated elements and spatial depth. 73

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CHAPTER FOUR RESIDENTIAL FLATS: DENSIFICATION IN VICTORIAN AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY LONDON RICHARD DENNIS

A key issue in London today is densification. In the face of a rapidly increasing population – but a lamentable rate of new housing construction, a determination to maintain the Green Belt, a public transport system at the limits of its capacity, and the necessity of building and maintaining a sustainable city – how do we increase residential densities in the existing built-up area without repeating the mistakes that were made with tower blocks and slab estates erected in the 1960s? Equally critical is the question of affordability, not only of owner-occupied but increasingly of privately rented accommodation, and not only for the poorest, but also for middle-income households.

MANSION FLATS: A MODEL FOR THE FUTURE One form of housing that is frequently cited as a past success to be both preserved and replicated is the ‘mansion flat’, a self-contained apartment of, typically, three to eight rooms on one level, in what, when they were first built in the second half of the nineteenth century, might be large (50+ units) and relatively high-rise (five- to eight-storey) blocks. Modest in scale by today’s standards, these nevertheless represented a substantial increase in density compared to two- or threestorey single-family dwellings or ‘town houses,’ terraced houses designed to accommodate one family over, typically, four storeys and a basement but, in reality, often occupied by more than one family sharing a single set of sanitary and cooking amenities. Thus, the Prince’s Foundation for Building Community’s report on Housing London: a Mid-Rise Solution (2014) commended the ‘mansion block form’ for promoting ‘the type of walkable, sustainable urbanism that London needs as it looks to solve its housing problems’. The Foundation noted that in areas of Paris dating from the Haussmann era, when apartment buildings averaged six storeys, mansion blocks arranged around private courtyards typically produced more than 220 dwellings per hectare.1 Writing in 2008, the Prince of Wales observed that ‘Kensington and Chelsea, which so far lacks tower blocks, is the densest London borough’: Kensington and Chelsea then had a density of 13,263 persons per square kilometre. As of 2015, it had been overtaken by Islington (15,118), Tower Hamlets (14,514), and Hackney (13,927) – but the borough’s ability to sustain such a high density, especially given the high socio-economic status of so many of its residents and, notoriously, the highest rate of long-term vacant dwellings in England outside of recession-hit areas of the north-east and north-west (2.02% of dwellings 75

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES vacant for at least the preceding six months) is remarkable evidence of the density possible with mid-rise town houses and flats.2 Advocates of ‘superdensity’ (150–350 homes per hectare) also support more mid-rise development in which apartment blocks of five to eight storeys are integrated with occasional taller buildings and family houses to produce high-density neighbourhoods with vibrant street life.3 The pre-Second World War ‘flat,’ on which I focus in this chapter, covers a multitude of different housing forms including: 1 Five- to eight-storey upper middle-class ‘French flats’ which mutated into ‘high-class mansion flats’, located in the West End and inner west London, occupied by bachelors, spinsters, widows and childless couples, but also by families with children, supported by resident domestic servants, and often treated as a metropolitan pied-à-terre in combination with a house in the country. They were initially leased on one- to three-year agreements from a company that owned only that building or, at most, that building and a few near neighbours, but are now owner-occupied or rented from a buy-to-let landlord whose interests are confined to the monetary returns from individual flats, not the continuing character of whole blocks. 2 Privately built, mostly inner suburban flats for the Edwardian and inter-war lower middle classes. Some aspiring to West End status, four or five storeys with a lift and common entrance hall, set in gardens or insulated from the worst of traffic noise by being confined to upper storeys over ground-floor shops. Others in rows of three-storey walk-ups. 3 Outer suburban (beyond London County Council boundaries but within Greater London), probably only three- or four-storey walk-up, also originally rented then owner-occupied following ‘flat break-up’, but – especially among inter-war blocks less attractive as objects of gentrification – now returning into renting. 4 Philanthropic, limited-dividend, local authority or even private-for-profit tenement block dwellings, initially arranged as one- to three-room suites, often sharing some sanitary or cooking facilities, let on weekly terms to working-class families; now restructured into self-contained one- or two-bedroom flats, managed by more commercially minded latter-day housing associations, but with at least a minority of flats in private ownership. This chapter is primarily focused on the first three categories although, as I will show, the difference between philanthropic or limited-dividend block dwellings and the bottom end of the private, lower middle-class flat market was not as clear-cut as has sometimes been suggested. I will pay relatively less attention to the very top end of the market – luxury mansion flats in the West End – in part because they are the best documented in a hitherto sparse historical literature, but principally because, except in their scale, they offer less of a model for solutions to our present-day housing problems.4 What seems most desirable, and most feasible, is a slight scaling-up – from, say, three storeys to six – of the kinds of flats built either side of 1900 for lower middle-class Londoners in what are now the inner suburbs.

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ORIGINS Occasional proposals for middle-class flats in London date from the late 1840s. Around the time when the Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes (SICLC) and the Metropolitan Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrious Classes (MAIDIC) were erecting their first blocks of working-class ‘model dwellings’, a succession of correspondents to The Builder proposed the erection of model dwellings for the middle classes. They argued that rising land values and rents were forcing middle-income families either to live in ever more distant suburbs, beyond the reach of existing public transport (primarily, horse-drawn omnibuses), or to rent town houses which they could not really afford, therefore obliging them to take in lodgers – with all the attendant problems of sharing sanitary and cooking facilities, loss of privacy, fire risks, and susceptibility to the spread of infectious diseases among sharers with differing standards of cleanliness and safety. Writing early in 1849, Architectural Association member F Chambers claimed that ‘it is statistically a fact that 75% of London houses are inhabited by more than one family’, and this ‘fact’ was repeated through the following decades, by William Young (later in 1849), Henry Morley (1855), Arthur Ashpitel and John Whichcord, the authors of Town Dwellings (1855), and by T Roger Smith and William H White, discussing ‘Model Dwellings for the Rich’ at the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (now the RSA) in March 1876.5 Initially, the proposed (but seldom implemented) solution to the problem of multi-occupancy was to build terraces of single-storey dwellings piled on top of one another, with each dwelling still boasting its own front door onto an open gallery – effectively a high-level street. This had been the model used by the SICLC in building their ‘Model Houses for Families’ (Parnell House) on Streatham Street, Bloomsbury, in 1850, where the front door of each ‘house’ (actually a two- or three-room flat) opened onto a publicly accessible gallery.6 William Young’s plan proposed exactly the same arrangement for middle-class dwellings (Figure 4.1). The multi-storey tenement or apartment house was also frequently invoked as the ideal to emulate, through reference to Edinburgh and Paris (the latter muted by suspicions about questionable standards of morality and cleanliness among the French).7 ‘GC,’ writing in The Builder in 1851, advocated ‘as in Paris, houses right through from street to street, the ground and first-floor [for] warehouses, the second-floor apartments for the managing men, the third for superior clerks, fourth inferior ones, fifth for your porters and labourers’.8 Resistance, however, stemmed from the very success of model dwellings for the poor, and the lack of an appropriate stylistic language to differentiate middle-class from working-class flats. The former were erected on and near to the newly cut Victoria Street in Westminster, including Mr Mackenzie’s five-storey ‘houses’ (1853), each including six shops on the ground floor and two eight-roomed flats (drawing room, dining room, kitchen, four bedrooms and a servants’ bedroom) on each of four upper floors. There was a central light well adjacent to toilets, a principal staircase and separate servants’ stairs. Rents ranged from £80 to £200 per annum, inclusive of rates and taxes. 9 Presumably, in the absence of a lift, lower rents were charged for upper storeys. Although Mackenzie’s flats no longer exist, some classically dignified flats dating from the early 1860s survive in nearby Morpeth Terrace and Carlisle Place, sandwiched between much grander, flamboyant, 1880s mansion flats (Figure 4.2).10 77

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES The problem of how to present the exterior of luxury flats was still evident in the 1870s when Queen Anne’s Mansions, London’s first truly high-rise (11-storey) block was erected close to St James’s Park.11 The Saturday Review observed that ‘The outside of the building is not particularly attractive. It looks like a spinning mill’, but also acknowledged that, blessed with a ‘capital lift’, the ‘three top flats are delightful on a fine day’ with ‘a magnificent and ever-changing view when the Westminster fogs will allow them to see anything at all’, 12 It should be noted, however, that it took several more decades before the top storeys of mansion flats, marketed as ‘penthouses’, would command higher rents than those lower down. ‘Penthouse’ was being used to describe roof-top apartments in the 1920s, but in Britain it was still an American affectation until after the Second World War.13 As a typical example of rents declining with height, consider Chelsea Court, a six-storey block fronting onto Chelsea Embankment, designed in 1897 by Delissa Joseph and comprised of eighteen identical suites, each with five bedrooms and three reception rooms; Carlyle Mansions, close by and of 1886 so slightly older, is a comparable building (Figure 4.3). Rents for the Chelsea Court flats facing the river ranged from £525 per annum for first-floor flats to only £275 on the top (fifth) floor.14 A more complex – and exceptional – pattern of rents applied at Wellington Court, a ‘magnificent and palatial building’ with frontages to Hyde Park and Knightsbridge: flats with views over the park commanded much higher rents than those without views, but the highest rents of all were for the fourth floor, park-side (£750 for a four-bedroom flat with ‘superb views’) and for the top, fifth floor (£850 for a five-bedroom flat with ‘unsurpassed views’).15

FIGURE 4.1, ABOVE, TOP William Young’s ‘Model Town Houses for the Middle Classes,’ from The Builder, 1 December 1849. FIGURE 4.2, ABOVE, BOTTOM Mansion flats of the 1860s in Carlisle Place. 78

In 1921, the final issues of Flats, an advertising magazine published by Victoria Street estate agents Robins, Snell & Terry advised that the value of ground-floor flats was usually about 15% less than those on the first floor, while basement flats were worth only about half the value of first-floor flats. Where no passenger lift was provided, each floor above the first was valued at approximately 10% less than the floor immediately below it.16 In practice, however, it seems that even where there were passenger lifts, values decreased with height, as at Chelsea Court and also at Ashley Gardens, seven-storey luxury flats adjacent to Westminster Cathedral. By the 1890s, when Ashley Gardens was built, mansion flats had become an accepted fixture among middle-class dwellings in

CHAPTER FOUR RICHARD DENNIS London, promoted especially in lectures and articles by William H White and Frederick Eales in the late 1870s and early 1880s.17 White had lived in flats in Paris during the 1860s; he became secretary of the RIBA in 1878, and he lived in Oxford & Cambridge Mansions, a five-storey and basement block of flats near Edgware Road Station, from its opening in 1881 until his death in 1896.18 White was anxious to demonstrate that Parisian families were not as casual about privacy and decency as British critics claimed, and that the design of French flats was compatible with a proper separation of public and private space. He acknowledged that single-family houses with gardens were the ideal but, given the statistics on multioccupancy, it was surely better to erect purpose-built flats, each with its own sanitary facilities and soundproof walls, than to tolerate sharing less well-equipped houses. White invoked a tradition of flat-living dating back to the insulae of Cicero’s Rome. In describing a typical Parisian apartment building from the 1860s, he referred to each storey above the ground floor as a ‘house’ of about eight rooms, extending round three sides of a courtyard from a hall which opened off the principal staircase to back stairs at the end of a servants’ corridor. His proposals for similar buildings in London would offer ‘not barracks, taverns, or co-operative hotels, but – purely and simply – homes’. 19 White argued that the small kitchens in Parisian flats were perfectly adequate, because servants and their mistresses could shop for fresh produce daily in conveniently situated markets; that Parisian families dined in the privacy of their homes just as London families did; and that the interconnecting layout of rooms did not promote immorality and indecency, because functional segregation operated in time as well as space, and ‘chambre’ in Paris did not mean the same as ‘bedroom’ in London.

FIGURE 4.3, ABOVE Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, by Walter Seckham Witherington, 1886.

Frederick Eales, the architect of Oxford & Cambridge Mansions, thought that, to ensure a proper separation of eating, sleeping and working areas, the ‘best arrangement’ was ‘to have the bedrooms separated from the kitchen and servants’ part by the reception-rooms.’ His ideal suite comprised ‘three good rooms in front, consisting of dining-room, drawing-room, and best bedroom,’ a total of four bedrooms, bathroom, two waterclosets (one ‘in the neighbourhood of the servants’ part’) and kitchen. The two reception rooms should be separated by folding or sliding doors, so that they could be combined into one ‘as occasion may require.’ While Eales imagined such flats to 79

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES accommodate middle-class families, he conceded that ‘Flats were not suited for children. It was most disagreeable to be always meeting them on the stairs.’20 Unlike the most luxurious buildings in the late 1870s and early 1880s, Oxford & Cambridge Mansions originally lacked a lift. Most early blocks of ‘French flats’ were arranged as series of ‘houses’, in which one flat (or sometimes two) opened off each staircase landing. So, at Oxford & Cambridge Mansions, there were 12 staircases providing access to 74 flats. Eales reckoned that it would cost between £400 and £500 to install a lift, but once the running costs had been factored in, the cost was around £800.21 With rents per suite no higher than £150–200 per annum, the gross rental income per staircase was only about £1,000–£1,500, making it uneconomical to provide a separate lift in each ‘house’. But by the early 1900s, the cost of installing lifts had diminished (Sydney Perks, the author of Residential Flats of All Classes (1905) gave a figure of £150). Electric lifts were 30% more expensive than hydraulic lifts to install, but their running costs were only a fifth. And ‘a boy can work one’, making the attendants’ wages much lower, too. Despite Perks’ opinion that it was ‘rarely an economical arrangement to make a lift serve more than three suites on a floor’, the building of blocks with one grand entrance and several flats opening from internal corridors on each floor made it more feasible for one or more centrally positioned lifts to serve all the residents.22 There were other design questions to be addressed, related to: the segregation of different functions, ideally with separate corridors for ‘public’ rooms where non-family members would be entertained, ‘private’ rooms (mainly bedrooms and bathrooms), and ‘services’ (kitchen, scullery, servants’ quarters) (Figure 4.4); the segregation of servants and tradesmen from family members and visitors in the ‘common parts’ of the building (the need for separate lifts or staircases), at the same time ensuring that servants could not gossip with their peers from other flats, and could not slip off-duty down unsupervised back stairs; the avoidance of windowless rooms dependent on ‘borrowed light’, typically, a fanlight over a door, but also of tiny ventilation shafts and ‘areas’ or light wells in the interior of blocks. But, from the perspective of building managers, it was equally undesirable that tenants should fraternise too freely, and Perks advised against too many communal facilities such as ornamental gardens and common drawing rooms: ‘The tenants meet constantly, and there are numerous complaints, petty jealousies, and a thousand and one annoyances in consequence … It is far better that the tenants should remain strangers, and the ordinary flats where there is little chance of social intercourse are much easier to manage.’23 Perks also dismissed the idea of roof gardens on flat-roofed blocks: out of London, ‘the tenants never use the garden’ on the roof of ‘seaside flats’ at Bexhill; in London ‘The dirt and smuts … make a roof garden impossible.’ He also deemed flat roofs on artisans’ dwellings a failure.24 But Perks was unduly pessimistic: there are both fictional and autobiographical references testifying to the attractions of flat roofs for children’s playgrounds, drying washing, gardening and solitary contemplation. 25 Flats provided endless inspiration for contemporary authors of fiction, drama and comic writing. The journalist George R Sims, author of How the Poor Live (1883), adapted ‘Flats in Four Stories’ (1881) from a French farce, ‘Les locataires de Monsieur Blondeau’. In Paris, the joke was that a manufacturer thinks he can take life easy by becoming a rentier, so he buys an apartment block, only to discover that the tenants are figures from his past life come back to haunt him – but in 80

CHAPTER FOUR RICHARD DENNIS London, the joke was the whole idea of living in a block of flats. The stage directions set the action in ‘Mr Gigglethorpe’s House, 90 Queen Anne’s Mansions’. The novelist George Gissing frequently set his characters in homes in flats: in The Whirlpool (1897), the Carnabys, newly returned from travelling the world, settle in the real Oxford & Cambridge Mansions, while in The Odd Women (1893) a key turn in the plot hinges on the ambiguity of not-quite private, not-quite public space: the common staircase of a mansion block in Bayswater. In Howards End (1910), EM Forster refers to ‘Babylonian flats’ which are displacing elegant town houses like that leased by the Schlegel sisters in ‘Wickham Place’ in the West End. The flats are part of the restless ‘architecture of hurry’ that Forster so disparaged in his condemnation of contemporary society.27 More comically, TWH Crosland, in The Suburbans, lampooned ‘Subub’ and ‘Mrs Subub’ for espousing flat-life in ‘naughty St John’s Wood’ in the early 1900s.28

FLATS FOR THE ‘UNCLASSED’

FIGURE 4.4, ABOVE Floor plan of typical mansion flats, showing the separation of public and private spaces: Overstrand Mansions, Battersea, 1893.

Many blocks of flats occupied an ambiguous social space, somewhere between artisans’ block dwellings and luxury apartments. As a struggling writer, with an artisan’s income but an intellectual’s aspirations, Gissing lived in a modest top-floor three-room flat, 7K Cornwall Residences, behind Baker Street Station. Cornwall Residences comprised six six-storey walk-up blocks erected between 1872 and 1876 (Figure 4.5). The Metropolitan Railway acquired the buildings in 1902, intending to demolish them in the course of enlarging the station, although in practice most of the blocks survived until 2008, when they were replaced by newly built flats. Though including some underground parking and other facilities, these were otherwise on a similar scale to the original flats: an efficient use of a compact, awkward site. Two blocks demolished in 1915 provided space for one end of Chiltern Court, the luxury flats eventually erected by the railway company over the rebuilt station in the late 1920s. Whereas Gissing paid £40 per annum for his top-floor flat in 1884, HG Wells and Arnold Bennett, among the first tenants of Chiltern Court, paid £900 and £1,175 respectively for their much grander flats.29 Commenting on Smith and White’s Society of Arts paper, one Dr Wylde (almost certainly Henry Wylde, Professor of Music at Gresham College) observed that ‘there had recently been erected near Regent’spark some better class buildings called Cornwallis-mansions 81

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES [sic], six stories high … and they were all taken long before they were completed.’ Wylde ‘knew ladies who resided in them, and who were highly pleased with the accommodation. Rich men who lived in the squares would not take these flats, but there were many people, to whom economy was an object, who would be glad to do so.’30 Nevertheless, Cornwall Mansions were not especially attractive. One of Gissing’s private pupils remembered the ‘dimly lit stone staircases’ which misled him into describing the building as ‘Artisans’ Flats’. Charles Booth’s assistant described them as ‘a block of gloomy flats’ and Perks noted that ‘the rooms are large and lofty … but no attempt was made to build a good hall’. In fact, it was only in 1888 that the management changed the name from ‘Residences’ to ‘Mansions,’ regarded by Gissing as an ‘amusing piece of flunkeyism’. 31

FIGURE 4.5, ABOVE Cornwall Mansions, Allsop Place, Baker Street,1872 (demolished 2008). 82

As early as 1878 The Builder had carried an article entitled ‘“Buildings” – “Mansions” – “Flats” – “Residences” – “Dwellings” ’, highlighting the subtle, status-seeking nomenclature employed by developers and landlords, but its own headlines could be just as overblown. In 1877 the magazine had reported on ‘Building in Flats for the Middle Classes in Camberwell’. Located on and to the north of Albany Road, close to its junction with Camberwell Road, these 18 six-storey blocks comprised 324 ‘tenements’ of between three and six rooms, at rents of 7/6 to 12/6 per week. There was to be a flat roof for recreation and drying laundry, and groundlevel playgrounds behind the buildings. In an effort to impress, it was stated that ‘windows of the three upper floors will be what are called Venetian’.33 Twenty years on, George Duckworth, Charles Booth’s assistant, was unconvinced, commenting that the buildings were ‘dull, dingy, dark: mess behind, very little space between blocks. Music hall artistes. A few thieves, mixed class’.34 Significantly, though, this was not a greenfield development, but an attempt at ‘densification’ on land previously occupied by residences with large gardens. Even more misleadingly, the headline ‘Middle-Class Buildings in Flats in Kennington Road’ described a five-storey tenement block in a Lambeth back street characterised by Duckworth as ‘no mechanics: but poor & cabmen: great place for pitch & toss’ – that is, not remotely middle-class.35 Reports of other blocks aimed at ‘small middle-class families

CHAPTER FOUR RICHARD DENNIS with moderate incomes’, who might otherwise have to share part of a house with a stranger, or move ‘some rail-distance’ out of town, were more accurate. Frederick Nesbitt Kemp drew attention to a block being erected in Fulham Road, close to Chelsea Station, each flat offering two or more bedrooms, sitting room, kitchen, scullery and water closet: ‘being all on one floor and very compact, one servant will be more than sufficient’.36 More expensive were James Blyth’s middle-class dwellings near St John’s Wood Station, 12 five-room selfcontained flats distributed over six floors. ‘Though the distinction between the sitting, the sleeping, and the cooking accommodation is not so defined as we should advocate, the arrangement of the dwelling is an improvement upon the ordinary London “flat”.’ There were ‘already numerous applicants who seem prepared to give £75 a year for a home on the top floor’.37 Matthew Allen, best known for collaborating with Sydney Waterlow in designing and building artisan flats for the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company, also built several blocks of lower middle-class flats on his own account in Bethune Road, Stoke Newington in the mid-1870s: ten three-storey blocks backing onto communal gardens (Figure 4.6). There was an extensive range of communal facilities – a row of washhouses (one for each tenant), a croquet lawn, children’s playground, garden-room complete with piano which could be used for dancing and other entertainment, and billiard room. The Builder concluded that ‘The arrangement of the buildings ... are partly on the Scottish principle; whilst the laying out of the grounds is after the French system; but Mr Allen claims to have retained the all important feature of an English home, – perfect privacy. The ceilings between each flat being constructed of concrete with iron joists running through the centre of the same, are fireproof. It is stated that little or no sound penetrates...’ 38 Critically, 140 years on, this is still a sought-after residential environment, recently restored to include sharedownership and ‘affordable rent’ flats as well as flats for sale. The communal gardens now accommodate an organic market garden and an ‘eco-classroom’.39

FIGURE 4.6, TOP Matthew Allen’s flats of 1874 in Bethune Road, Stoke Newington.

Isobel Watson has traced the histories of several flat-building entrepreneurs in late Victorian and early twentieth-century London, including James Hartnoll and Abraham Davis.40 Starting out as a joiner in Peckham, Hartnoll soon ventured into speculative building, specialising in flats that bridged the gap 83

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES between philanthropic block dwellings and middle-class mansion flats. It should be noted, however, that even the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company, generally regarded as a ‘five per cent’ (return on investment) company, also built flats catering for lower middle class clerks and teachers as much as for regularly employed artisans. On Chelsea Bridge Road, for example, the no-frills Wellington Buildings is hidden directly behind the turreted and mansard-roofed Chelsea Gardens (1879), whose tenants included Jerome K Jerome. George Gissing set the City partnerturned-grocer hero of his last completed novel, Will Warburton, in a flat there. Booth’s investigators described Wellington Buildings as ‘gloomy: light shut out in front’, but still designated it ‘pink’ in their colour-coding system (some comfortable, some poor). Chelsea Gardens was ‘really built as part of Wellington Buildings, but owing to their fine position appropriated by a wealthier class. Many prostitutes and kept women in them. Some servants’. 41 Hartnoll’s first major venture, Cavendish Buildings (now ‘Mansions’), was built for Samuel Toye of Mile End, who had bought land cleared by the Metropolitan Board of Works (MBW) when it constructed the eastward extension of Theobald’s Road in the late 1870s. Subsequently, Hartnoll purchased and developed other sites around the junction of Gray’s Inn Road, Theobald’s Road and Rosebery Avenue, including Holsworthy Square. Technically, these were ‘artisans’ dwellings’ and there was some opposition within the newly constituted London County Council (LCC) to the sale of land agreed by the outgoing MBW. Hartnoll also acquired sites from the MBW to erect seven blocks of ‘mansions’ fronting onto newly constructed Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue in the late 1880s. But his most dramatic intervention in London’s built environment was Devon (originally Hanover) Mansions, begun in 1885, a series of blocks originally totalling 525 flats on Tooley Street, south of Tower Bridge.42 Abraham Davis began in the East End, but subsequently moved west and shifted in scale and financial structure, from partnerships with his brothers to establishing limited companies and public utility societies such as the London Housing Society (which developed a large area south of St Pancras Station) and the Public Utility Housing Society (which operated in upmarket St John’s Wood) building flats which were simultaneously ‘high class residential’ as demanded by the ground landlords and ‘working class’, thereby qualifying for government subsidies. In all, Davis had erected more than 2,000 flats by his death in 1924. Rents for the LHS flats near St Pancras ranged between 5s. and 12s. 6d. per week for one- to three-room flats – more expensive than Improved Industrial Dwellings Company flats in the same area, but on a par with council flats erected by St Pancras Borough Council a few years earlier.43 Contrary to popular perceptions, therefore, there was no clear divide between ‘model dwellings for the poor’ and ‘mansion flats for the rich’, but a continuum of different types of flats suitable for all social classes and incomes.

CORPORATE OWNERSHIP A critical stage was reached when flat-building and management moved from a succession of one-off schemes to the scale of corporate ownership, not simply for a single location that would have been beyond the resources of an individual developer – as, for example, Kensington Gore Mansions Ltd (1877), the Albert Hall Mansions Company (1878), or Victoria Street Properties Ltd (promoted in 1898 to take over Albert Mansions, which lined the north side of the street) – but to build or acquire a portfolio of mansion blocks all over London.44 84

CHAPTER FOUR RICHARD DENNIS City & West End Properties Ltd was formed in 1897 to acquire and manage 448 residential flats, in Westminster, Chelsea, Knightsbridge and Earl’s Court, but also Russell Chambers in Bloomsbury and shops and offices in the City.45 Consolidated London Properties Ltd (1898) acquired 386 flats: Burlington Mansions, Cork Street; Palace Gardens Mansions, Notting Hill; Oxford & Cambridge and Hyde Park Mansions, the blocks designed by Eales near Edgware Road; Prince’s Mansions, Victoria Street; and Osborne and Windsor Mansions, Northumberland Street (now Luxborough Street), Marylebone (Figure 4.7).46 Almost all of these buildings were photographed by Bedford Lemere in 1899 and his photographs appeared in an illustrated brochure, ‘Residential Flats and Chambers To Let’, which included details of both companies’ flats.47 The two companies shared directors: Thomas Boyce was managing director of the former and chairman of the latter; WH Jones was a director of the former and managing director of the latter; and MJ Tarry, a director of the former, was also managing director of Ashley Gardens Properties Ltd. William Rolfe was a director of both Consolidated London Properties and Ashley Gardens Properties. Part of Prince’s Mansions was cleared of residential tenants as early as 1900 and let as government offices, but many of the buildings are still extant as mansion flats today. Even older, the Middle Class Dwellings Company (MCDC) was formed in 1888 to erect mansion flats on Buckingham Palace Road, near Victoria Station, and Ridgmount Gardens, Bloomsbury. The company secretary, Frank Debenham, of the department store Debenham & Freebody, stood unsuccessfully as a Liberal in the 1889 LCC and 1892 general elections, but was appointed as a Progressive alderman on the LCC from 1889 to 1894. The chairman, Sir Richard Farrant, was also deputy chairman and managing director of the Artizans’, Labourers’ & General Dwellings Company, famous for its suburban cottage estates at Shaftesbury Park, Queen’s Park and Noel Park; the two companies shared offices in Great George Street. In the mid-1890s, Farrant also became a director of Rowton Houses Limited, providing hostel accommodation for working-class men, and of the Wharncliffe Dwelling Company, building homes – 540 flats in six parallel blocks of five-storey flats sandwiched between Lisson Grove and the Regent’s Canal and doubtfully entitled ‘Wharncliffe Gardens’ – for families displaced by the construction of Marylebone Station.48 However, the lease from the Bedford Estate to the MCDC for Ridgmount Gardens specified that the flats were ‘intended to be used only as residences for classes other than the “Artisan or labouring classes” ’.49 Here, therefore, there was a much clearer distinction between working-class and middle-class residences. Farrant and Debenham were apparently as interested as Hartnoll and Davis in providing for both artisans and the middle class, but maintained a geographical and commercial segregation between their philanthropic and commercial activities. The company changed its name to Western Mansions Ltd in 1905, but soon encountered financial difficulties. Although it survived until 1934, it effectively became a subsidiary of the London County Freehold and Leasehold Property Company Ltd (LCF), founded in 1909 and ‘probably the most prestigious of the residential investment companies which emerged in the inter-war period.’50 Hamnett and Randolph note that the LCF ‘prided itself on its stable management – there were only two managing directors over the whole period 1924 to 1969 – and good tenant relations, reflected in a company-wide tenants association, and the company’s telex address of “Pampered, London” ’. As late as 1965, the company boasted of its ‘top class management, sound 85

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES finance, steady progress and the determination to offer the City a fundamentally good opening to the investor’. None of this commended the company to the era of casino capitalism and asset-stripping that subsequently characterised the London housing market.51 By 1925, LCF owned over 100 properties, mostly residential and mostly in central London. A company prospectus reported that 59% of its value lay in Hampstead, Maida Vale, Oxford Street and Wigmore Street; 19% in Kensington, Barnes, Clapham and Holloway; 10% in Twickenham and Herne Hill; and the remaining 12% in ‘other districts’ (Figure 4.8). 52 Of 2,500 flats owned by the company in December 1926, only six were vacant, and fewer than 10% had changed tenants during the preceding year. Only 200 flats rented for more than £200 per annum, but by working prudently, the company was able to pay its shareholders a 9% dividend.53 By 1929, the company had 2,888 tenants of whom 2,607 paid less than £300 per annum and 1,194 were ‘statutory tenants’ (protected by rent control).54 During 1932 alone, the company purchased 1,004 flats and 53 shops, bringing the total portfolio to ‘over 6,000 flats, shops and offices’. Losses due to vacancies were now 5.7% of the potential rent; 857 changes of tenancy and renewal of leases took place during the year.55 The value of the company’s holdings – in total about 5,000 mansion flats at rents from £50 to £1,500 – increased from £1.2 million in 1925 to £5.5 million in 1931. Yet, because their flats had mostly been built before the First World War, the rooms were ‘more commodious than those of the modern built flat’ and ‘no longer subject to all the troubles incident to new buildings, such as settlements, cracks in walls, shrinkage of timber, and so on’.56

FIGURE 4.7, ABOVE Map showing the distribution of flats owned by City & West End Properties and Consolidated London Properties, c.1900. 86

In Bloomsbury, where blocks ran as high as eight storeys, the newest building, Witley Court, contained the smallest flats (one to three bedrooms and reception rooms), equipped with ‘all reasonable labour-saving devices’ (refrigerators, constant hot water and central heating, electric passenger and trade lifts), all let for less than £200 per annum. By contrast, Ridgmount Gardens and Gordon Mansions were older blocks with larger flats (two to seven rooms) at rents up to £324. In Stamford Hill and Holloway, blocks were three or four storeys (without passenger lifts) and the range of flat sizes was much smaller – all three to five rooms, with rents varying between £65 and £125. In Kensington, rents were much higher, but flats were much larger: between five and 11 rooms and three bathrooms in

CHAPTER FOUR RICHARD DENNIS

Albert Court (£350–£1,000), five to eight rooms and two bathrooms in Albert Hall Mansions (£275–£700), a modest £200–£285 for five- and six-room flats in Iverna Gardens, off Kensington High Street, and £275–£500 for six to eight rooms in Barkston Gardens, Earl’s Court. All these buildings dated from the late nineteenth century and ‘could not be built to-day on this scale to let at anything approaching the rentals offered’. Only Phillimore Court, where flats were only two to six rooms, came equipped with the most up-to-date facilities – ‘hardwood floors, electric press-button lifts and a water softening plant’ and ‘a pleasant roof garden’ – although it also offered ‘adequate labour-saving servants’ quarters’, all for £185–£475 per annum.57 FIGURE 4.8, ABOVE Map showing the distribution of flats owned by London County Freehold & Leasehold Properties Limited in 1933.

The emphasis on tradition, homeliness and stability continued in The Ideal London Home, an advertising brochure issued in 1933 which highlighted the locational, health-giving, and homely characteristics of mansion flats, and the trustworthiness of the company: ‘Since becoming a public company in 1925, we have not sold a single block of our Mansion Flats. We buy only after 87

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES the closest expert investigation, and as investors – not as dealers. This must inspire in our tenants a sense of complete security of tenure.’ Yet change was afoot. The new brochure had a fresh, modern typeface; stylised, thumbnail illustrations of details such as dressing table, fireplace, bay windows and even a grand piano implied a very contemporary Modern ambience, and Le Corbusier’s observation that ‘a flat is a machine for living in’ was quoted, albeit with the qualification that ‘it must also be a “home” with all the intimate associations implicit in that very English word’.58 By 1938, and now operating under the soubriquet of ‘Key-Flats’, LCF owned over 8,500 flats, boasted an annual rental income of £1.5 million, and operated through a network of 21 district offices and an Oxford Street head office.59 The Times’ property pages offered regular evidence of a booming trade in mansion flats, although this was more often a consequence of business failures and executors’ sales than of short-term speculation. Consider two advertisements which reflected the geographical and socio-economic range of activities. In 1911, Hampton and Sons advertised an auction ‘by order of mortgagees’ of four ‘important blocks of high-class flats’, each of eight suites, in Prebend Mansions, Chiswick; ten blocks of ‘sound and remunerative investments’, each of six flats, in Hargrave Mansions, Holloway (Figure 4.9); four similarly described blocks, each of eight flats in Loraine Mansions, Holloway; six blocks of ‘good-class flats’, each of eight suites in Cowley Mansions, North Brixton; two ‘imposing blocks of high-class flats’, of nine and ten suites in Biddulph Mansions, Maida Vale; plus individual blocks of between three and ten flats each in Stamford Hill, Maida Vale, Balham, and West Hampstead – a total of 240 flats yielding a gross yearly rental of just over £11,000, and ranging from £32 per flat in Holloway to £70 in Chiswick. The cheapest flats in Holloway were let on weekly terms, most of the others on three- or five-year agreements.60 Twenty years on, Goddard & Smith offered for sale a high-class block in Knightsbridge, yielding a gross rental of £30,675 per annum, plus 11 separate blocks comprising 192 middle-class mansion flats ‘of the most popular low-rented type for which there is a regular demand’. These were variously located in Holland Park, Oxford Street, Hammersmith, Chelsea, West Kensington, Bloomsbury, Highgate, Cricklewood, Hampstead and Brixton, and were estimated to yield £23,287 per annum, an average of just over £121 per flat.61 Critically, it was always the annual rental income that was highlighted, determining what purchasers would pay in order to get a reasonable rate of return.

AFTERWORD Working from 1978 valuation data, Hamnett and Randolph identified 1,152 privately owned blocks erected before 1919, nearly all in inner London, and comprising 40,675 flats; and a further 1,327 blocks (56,342 flats) erected between 1919 and 1939, of which 509 blocks (16,913 flats) were in outer London.62 These data include some ‘artisans’ dwellings’ owned by housing trusts, but they omit blocks with fewer than ten flats, and also any pre-war blocks that had been demolished (e.g. as a result of bombing) or that had become non-residential (such as central London flats converted to offices – the opposite of the process that has predominated more recently). In total, they represent a substantial and still under-researched and under-appreciated sector of London’s housing market, but one which passed, mostly from the 1960s, from long-term investors ‘who had a vested interest in both good maintenance of their blocks and good landlord88

CHAPTER FOUR RICHARD DENNIS tenant relations’ to ‘a new, aggressive breed of speculative landlords whose principal interest [was] not in long-term maintenance but in short-term capital gains derived from the rapid sale of flats.’63 This so-called flat ‘break-up’ involved selling individual long leaseholds, initially to owner-occupiers but latterly to buy-to-let landlords. City & West End and Consolidated London both became part of Trafalgar House which was, by 1970, not only selling their flats, but ‘had moved into the business of buying blocks in order to carry out breakups’. LCF suffered the same fate following acquisition by MEPC.64 Nevertheless, for our purposes, it is the continued existence of the buildings, and the positive part they played in London’s housing market when they were first erected, that provides an example for future human-scale, tenant-friendly densification; and it is the modest but homely densification associated with three-storey walk-ups in Holloway and late Victorian and Edwardian four-storey buildings in West Hampstead and Kilburn that provides a model for future suburban densification.

FIGURE 4.9, ABOVE Hargrave Mansions, Holloway.

Tenure is as critical as quantity. In the nineteenth century, private renting was mutually beneficial to responsible, mostly small-scale landlords and their tenants; and in the first half of the twentieth century, businesses such as LCF still professed more interest in income from rents than in speculating on rising capital values. Rents then were affordable because they had not been distorted by well-meant state intervention subsequently exploited by landlords and their legal advisers alert to every loophole in tax or welfare legislation, or by global financial markets treating property as a bank rather than a place to live. Short of radical reform of land ownership and land taxation, and the acceptance of more modest and longer-term returns on the part of investors, there is little prospect of a return to a more urbane housing market. Meanwhile, current housing policy repeats the private ‘break-up’ of selling individual flats to sitting tenants, new owner-occupiers and absentee buy-to-let landlords with a social housing break-up applying the same rules to London as to non-metropolitan areas, and obsessed with the fetish of home-ownership despite all the indicators – of geographical mobility, occupational insecurity and changing household structures – that demonstrate the need for a continuing, functional (as opposed to dysfunctional) rental housing market.

89

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES One current initiative, Build to Rent, aims to mobilise institutional investors such as pension funds to provide secure rental housing, offering relatively long three-year tenancies in integrated developments with onsite amenities.65 To date, most Build to Rent schemes in London involve much higher-rise blocks than the five- to eight-storey mansion-flat scale of development that, as ‘Superdensity’ and the Prince’s Foundation both show, offers sufficient scope on its own for a denser, more efficient and environmentally sustainable London matching the lifestyles, household structures, mobility and expectations of the city’s population. At Home in Britain, an RIBA exhibition in 2016, featured an inviting ‘Mecanoo Mansion’, mixing maisonettes for families with children, small studios for students and young professionals, and lofts for elderly households in ‘a mansion block for the 21st century’.66 The problem is how to combine this architecturally and socially sensitive solution with the financial viability and socially responsible ownership and management of Build to Rent.

90

CHAPTER FIVE SOUTH ACTON UNSUSTAINED PETER GUILLERY

This chapter is a sort of memoir – a reflective and partly rueful account, more than a decade later, of a largely unsuccessful attempt to mobilise housing history. It is about the recidivism of obsolescence, about how serviceable buildings of entirely different types are repeatedly misidentified as the causes of social problems, and about the difficulty of confronting discourses and economic structures that prioritise renewal over continuity. It is also about the importance of retrospection, about how time colours research and knowledge. In 2004–5 I was responsible for an English Heritage survey of South Acton, an area that comprised one of the largest post-war public housing estates in west London, 2,152 homes for about 5,200 people (Figures 5.1–2). There had not previously been any real historical study of the place – the Buildings of England described South Acton as ‘soulless wastes’. 1 English Heritage’s own account of London’s suburbs paid regard locally only to the late nineteenth-century development of the Mill Hill Park Estate, seen as compromised by ‘the proximity of the working-class South Acton area with its piggeries and laundries’.2 The South Acton survey came about following an approach from local residents amid intense local debate about regeneration. The South Acton Residents Action Group (SARAG), formed in 1997 as a direct response to regeneration initiatives, found itself alienated from Ealing Borough Council’s plans for partial demolition, new mixed-tenure housing and higher overall densities.3 Fearing the loss of good buildings and open spaces, and the destabilisation of established communities, SARAG initiated its own masterplanning study. Its aims included recognition of the distinct character of various neighbourhoods within South Acton, and concluded by quoting John Ruskin – ‘When we build, let us think that we build for ever.’ SARAG asserted that ‘the history, continuity and community spirit of the area is important and should inform what happens and which buildings are retained’. 4

INTRODUCTION The objective for English Heritage (then bearing the responsibilities for the historic environment that have since passed to Historic England) was to take a historical look at the place, to produce what was called ‘historic environment characterisation’. Characterisation was defined by English Heritage as building up ‘area-based pictures of how places in town and country have developed over time. It shows how the past exists within today’s world. These fascinating insights into the historic environment, however, are about the future, not the past. Characterisation is not an 91

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES academic exercise but a vital tool for developers and planners to make sure that a place’s historical identity contributes properly to everyone’s Quality of Life.’5 In spite of knowledge built up from years of work on the post-war listings programme, English Heritage had no internal models for this kind of assessment in this kind of place. Here was a chance to test the ideals of characterisation against the realities of regeneration and to explore an approach to the historical investigation of post-war housing that would extend beyond hierarchical judgments of architectural quality or significance. It was obvious from the outset that South Acton lacked the distinction that would warrant listing or conservation-area designation. This was not about designation, but about providing a model for the sympathetic assessment of comparable ordinary places. The report did not make specific recommendations. It was, like this book, about what had happened, and only indirectly about what should happen.6 Ealing Council, however, was not just uninterested, but overtly hostile, unable to see beyond the notion that English Heritage equalled preservation, and keen to minimise the complexities of managing an already fraught regeneration programme. Undeterred, we hastened to catch up, taking the buildings as the starting point, and undertaking fieldwork combined with documentary research, photography and phase mapping to construct a historical account. The resulting report, ‘South Acton: Housing Histories’, was basically a chronological story, blending social and economic contexts with details of topographical change and building development, architectural motivation and contexts assessed in passing, and character areas defined in conclusion. There were two appendices, a chronological list of major events and a gazetteer of public housing.7

FIGURE 5.1, ABOVE Aerial view of South Acton, 1946. 92

This was half of a dual approach, the other half being public engagement. A parallel study was commissioned from Fluid, an architectural practice with an admirable track record in community consultation. With the same tight time constraints, Fluid started with a local publicity blitz in schools, churches, clubs and through gatherings at community centres, as well as with a poster campaign. This was accompanied by the distribution of hundreds of cards canvassing responses to seven questions about perceptions of South Acton. A selection of the respondents was then invited to in-depth interviews, of which around 20 took place, lasting around an hour each. This more

CHAPTER FIVE PETER GUILLERY detailed material was collated and analysed to identify themes that could be said to characterise South Acton. From this, Fluid created an oral history-based synthesis of local residents’ thoughts, memories and feelings about South Acton, presented as another report entitled South Acton Stories: Sharing Histories, Revealing Identity, and as what was called (in retrospect rather quaintly) a ‘digital documentary,’ a CD of short films made up of archive material and interviews with local residents. The two approaches combined in many interesting ways to provide complementary explorations of convergence and divergence between architectural intentions and lived experience, academic and popular histories, official and what Raphael Samuel called ‘unofficial knowledge’.8 Informed by this experience, the abbreviated historical account presented here attempts to integrate official and unofficial knowledge. What was special about South Acton was, in great measure, its typicality. The place had a subtly unique disposition of familiar and widespread forms, representing virtually all approaches to public housing through the post-war period. Its buildings, most of which dated from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, were highand low-rise flats, varying in scale, materials and architectural and constructional quality, jumbled together and laid out with lots of open space that had not existed previously. All this arose from a programme of ‘comprehensive redevelopment’ initiated by Acton Borough Council to clear dense late nineteenthcentury terraces that had come to be considered slums. Acton and its post-1965 successor, Ealing Borough Council, were entirely responsible for carrying this through. Acton was outside the London County Council (LCC) area, and after 1965 the Greater London Council (GLC) did not get involved. Over the 1980s and 1990s, here as elsewhere, the problems and costs of maintaining public housing mounted, repairs became backlogged, and in 1996 Ealing began to plan ‘comprehensive regeneration’, still utterly typical. In 2001 a 21-storey tower, Barrie House, was demolished for low-rise houses to be built on its site.

FIGURE 5.2, ABOVE Aerial view of South Acton, 1971.

South Acton could be looked at as a kind of architectural zoo, an exhibition of housing types, dissonant in its combinations, and instructively representative of changing approaches through a long period. Post-war housing is seldom treated by architectural historians other than like this: in isolation, as a subject in its own right. It is rarely connected to nearby earlier and later developments, private, public or social.9 Linking housing across historical periods, and across building types in a specific 93

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES broader local context, helped make sense of the place, characterising mix rather than highlights, and revealing that South Acton was not, in fact, an exhibition, but rather a vernacular settlement. Finally, the extents to which reception, use and adaptation as opposed to design have affected (or failed to affect) what was initially provided were taken into account. Alterations can obviously be as revealing as original form.10 South Acton is a suburb, and suburbs are maddeningly mutable things, geographically, architecturally and temporally. Contingency is in their nature, and multiple identities and boundaries are not only possible, but inevitable. The placing of a peripheral place like South Acton at the centre of attention is itself a play with identity, a trick of the map. So we treated the area’s boundaries as soft, to reflect changing perceptions as to what actually constitutes South Acton. For example, an area between Acton High Street and Avenue Road was not considered a part of South Acton until it was redeveloped for public housing in the 1970s – thereafter it was lumped together with the rest of the estate. On the other hand, the area southeast of the railway was thought to be South Acton before the Second World War. However, it was not comprehensively redeveloped thereafter and had come to be known as Acton Green – lacking Modernist housing and having been gentrified, it seems it could no longer be South Acton. A major finding – though not a surprise – was how important, and how utterly forgotten, Victorian development, industry and demography had been in determining the separation, or, in professional jargon, impermeability, of the neighbourhood in the first place. South Acton’s ghettoisation had been assumed to be nothing but a product of post-war redevelopment. In fact, it has much deeper roots, even though boundaries have shifted.

SOUTH ACTON’S HOUSING HISTORIES

FIGURE 5.3, ABOVE Osborne Road, houses of the 1860s in 1954. 94

The story starts, as usual, with the arrival of the railways. After the Enclosure Act of 1859, an 85-acre estate was acquired by the British Land Company. This enterprise was an offshoot of the National Freehold Land Society, which had been formed by Liberals in the 1840s to buy land to sell to humbler party members, in plots just large enough to make them eligible to vote, incidentally facilitating the building of homes for artisans. New roads (Mill Hill Road and Avenue Road) were formed, and a number of villas were built in the early 1860s. Middle-class

CHAPTER FIVE PETER GUILLERY housing proved difficult to let, and subsequent development into the 1870s was on a smaller scale. The area south of Avenue Road was laid out on a grid as a firmly working-class district (Figures 5.1, and 5.3). Local employment (principally in laundries) and housing, as well as shops and pubs, were all intimately and densely integrated. Unlike neighbouring areas, South Acton was not a commuter suburb; its comparatively poor transport links made it self-contained and self-sufficient. By the 1890s the area had more than 200 laundries, small domestic concerns. It came to be called ‘Soapsud Island’. From about 1880 many houses were built with integral workshops, cart entrances leading to yards and long rear ranges with wash-houses below mangling and ironing rooms (Figure 5.4). There was also a good deal of pig-keeping. Meanwhile, just to the north-west, William Willett began in 1877 to develop the Mill Hill Estate as a select suburb, emulating Bedford Park. This was deliberately sealed off from the rest of South Acton, brick walls creating an impermeable enclave. Willett could not override South Acton’s entrenched working-class character, however, and the estate was not a big success, stagnating in the mid-1880s. Houses were subdivided and in many cases became overcrowded. Other late nineteenth-century and Edwardian development, further east, was largely in the form of cottage flats, two-storey terrace ‘houses’ designed as flats (see pp41–42).11

FIGURE 5.4, ABOVE 59–63 Osborne Road in 1964, shortly before demolition.

In the early twentieth century, ambitious developments in London’s western suburbs signalled idealistic, even utopian, approaches to the improvement of working-class housing. A famously progressive local model was the Brentham Garden Estate in north Ealing, a project begun in 1901 by a co-operative society, Ealing Tenants, as self-help housing for working people, and boosted from 1907 by the involvement of Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker.12 A new role for local government was also soon locally evident. From 1911 the LCC built the Old Oak Estate in East Acton, which was among the best of the picturesque cottage estates that grew out of Arts and Crafts and garden-city ideals to become admired throughout Europe. After the First World War and the homes ‘fit for heroes’ Addison Act of 1919, the Wormholt Estate followed. But in South Acton proper, council housing did not appear until the early 1930s, and then only in small blocks. Alongside co-operatives and council housing there were also ‘public utility societies’ (what would now be called housing associations). The United Women’s 95

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES Homes Association provided housing for single professional women near London’s stations, as on the west side of Gunnersbury Lane in the late 1920s and early 1930s; across the road, Gunnersbury Court, a private development designed by cinema architect J Stanley Beard, followed on from the rebuilding of Acton Town Station for the Piccadilly Line in 1936. Flat living was fashionable. South Acton, however, had declined. Its late nineteenth-century building stock, then about 50 years old, suffered from poor maintenance and, with sub-division of houses to flats, population densities increased to around 70 people per acre (ppa) in 1919, compared with only about 15ppa in adjacent wards to the north. In assessing this density it must be recalled that South Acton also contained all its laundries and other industry (Figure 5.4), and that ‘the streets were wide, there were no back-to-back houses or courts, and every dwelling had its own garden and yard’.13 There were spaces between the houses, but South Acton was no garden suburb (Figure 5.1). Of private garden space in the 1930s, Reg Dunkling recalled that ‘some enthusiasts cultivated a few flowers and vegetables but most just used it to store their unwanted junk … The poet who wrote about England’s “green and pleasant land” never lived in South Acton between the wars. Except for one small recreation area besides All Saints Church the green fields of yesteryear were covered by houses and laundries, and “pleasant” would in no way be the word to describe the life of the inhabitants. In the winter time, the smoke from industry and domestic chimneys added to the general gloom that existed in the area and even in the bright days of summer the grimy, featureless streets had little to commend them.’14 Bomb damage in the Second World War exacerbated housing shortages, while also creating open space. Densities rose to about 100ppa around 1950 and in 1956 Acton still claimed to be ‘the largest laundry town in Britain’.15 The post-war consensus, here as elsewhere, was that the slums needed to be swept away to improve the lives of their poor and exploited residents. The Greater London Plan of 1944, devised under the leadership of Sir Patrick Abercrombie, proposed population dispersal and declining densities from centre to edge, from 200ppa at the centre to 50 at the periphery. It suggested 136ppa for inner suburban districts, which included much of the LCC area. In these terms South Acton presented an interesting case, outside the County of London, but entirely urban, and thus essentially ‘inner suburban’. In a ‘flats versus houses’ debate it was clear that the former were inescapable for such densities, though prospective tenants generally always preferred the latter. Flats were also thought necessary to admit light and air, and to get away from the ‘confined’ limitations of streets. The new climate of centralised state planning represented a marked contrast to the uncontrolled speculative building and private landownership that had failed to sustain amenity in South Acton. But there was not yet a fundamental shift to planned as opposed to opportunistic development. Abercrombie knew that flexibility and pragmatism was necessary, noting too that ‘it is in relation to density that so many planning schemes tell the gaudiest lies’.16 Renewal was not easily or rapidly achieved. The Council acquired land in South Acton in 250 separate and largely compulsory purchases between 1908 and 1975. Early infill blocks included Bollo Court (1949–50), 32 maisonettes on the south side of Bollo Bridge Road that were among the earliest council homes to have central heating. Another, further north, was St Margaret’s Lodge. There, it was said, ‘children threw rubbish through the lower windows and generally made 96

CHAPTER FIVE PETER GUILLERY themselves a nuisance’.17 Acton Council urged more intensive policing while for some there was a belief that rebuilding would bring social reform. A Bollo Court resident wrote, ‘Never has a re-housing plan been so desperately needed from the moral welfare point of view of the young teenagers of South Acton. Never have I seen so many youngsters with so much time to create so much noise, managing to break so many gas lamps and milk bottles and generally make such a nuisance of themselves.’18 As this suggests, plans for ‘comprehensive redevelopment’ had been promulgated. These marked the beginning of a 30-year programme that was repeatedly adjusted to take account of changes in central government policy along the way. In 1947, striking a cautionary note against the notion of rebuilding as reform, the parish vicar Reverend Harry Nicholson commented: ‘We are already planning for a new South Acton. But it is the houses that want rebuilding, not the people. In the planning I hope this sense of belonging to a community will not be lost. South Acton was never planned – it just came like this. We should put that right … Better houses are needed, but if the community sense is lost South Actonites might lose more than they gained … There is something here of value which gives us a feeling of security and confidence. That must be preserved.’19 This was later reinforced from the same pulpit by the Bishop of London, Dr JWC Wand, who warned that ‘it did not matter how splendid the buildings were after redevelopment[;] if there was no centre around which the people could gather there would be no community spirit’.20 Buildings at the estate’s south end, which had been the area’s roughest district, marked South Acton’s first shift towards height and Modernism, initially in a somewhat Danish stock-brick manner, then taking more of a cue from Powell and Moya’s Churchill Gardens in Westminster (Figure 5.5). Design was overseen by Stanley Slight, Acton’s Borough Engineer.

FIGURE 5.5, ABOVE, TOP Woolf Court, 1952–4, and Maugham Court, 1961–2, in 2004. FIGURE 5.6, ABOVE, BOTTOM Hanbury Estate, 1955–9, in 2004.

The project’s third stage in the late 1950s, still under Slight, was the Hanbury Estate (Figure 5.6). High- and low-rise blocks were arrayed in what had become an orthodox manner. Post-war deliberations on the relative needs for houses, flats and maisonettes resolved around 1950 into a progressive consensus for ‘mixed development’, which referred to variety in visual and architectural effect as well as to building or dwelling size, but crucially also carried implications of a diluted social-condenser 97

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES ideal that Nye Bevan articulated in 1948: ‘We have to have communities where all the various income groups of the population are mixed.’ For the integration of blocks of flats with new social amenities, the LCC’s late 1940s development of Woodberry Down was a model. There working-class housing in Zeilenbau (parallel slab blocks) was introduced into a middleclass district to create mixed tenure. Government stopped using the term ‘working-class housing’ in 1949. 21 South Acton had none of the social engineering tensions of Woodberry Down, and Acton Council was deliberately not aiming at the 1944 plan’s ‘inner suburban’ (136ppa) measure. Density was held stable at around 100ppa for the sake of generous open space. The objective was the rebuilding of an already working-class area for a working-class population, yet the principles of ‘mixed development’ – dominated by tall blocks and landscaped open space which had come to be seen as ideal for ‘inner suburban’ areas – were applied. However, where houses and blocks of flats came together, few people ever wanted flats, houses always being much preferred – a preference that density requirements and subsidy regimes overrode.

FIGURE 5.7, ABOVE Tennis court adjoining Grahame Tower, Hanbury Estate, in 2004. 98

Novel features on the Hanbury Estate included frosted and toughened glass on balconies, as used by Powell and Moya, and an amplifier ‘to eliminate the unsightly appearance of individual television and wireless aerials’.22 An elaborately planted central courtyard had a playground with a concrete ship, and there was a tennis court (Figure 5.7). The spacious ‘multi-coloured “skyscraper” flats’ were well received when new: the kitchens were thought ‘a housewife’s delight’ and ‘Bathrooms for several of the families were something they read about in glossy magazines: separate bedrooms for children and parents unknown; and as for central heating, well, it was a dream.’23 As Alfred Harms witnessed, ‘Our rent has nearly doubled now, but we are glad to move.’24 A three-bedroom flat in one of the towers had 871 sq ft (78 sq m), more space than many of the area’s nineteenth-century houses, many of which had anyway been divided, and more than the area’s three-bedroom flats of the early 1930s which had been laid out according to the Tudor Walters report space standards.25 There were also refrigerators and ‘caged’ flat roofs for clothes drying on the taller blocks (though not on the lower blocks, to avoid unsightliness). The drying of clothes on balconies was strictly forbidden; ‘if you dare hang one item on your balcony, she [council official]’d be up like a shot, and if you argued with her and said you weren’t

CHAPTER FIVE PETER GUILLERY

going to take it down you’d be threatened with eviction.’26 From 1955 onwards there were objections from the Mill Hill Park Estate to what was happening in South Acton, especially as regards the height of new blocks. When plans were made public for Doyle House, just south of Mill Hill Park, it was asked, ‘are we going to have a laundry on the top with washing flapping about on Sundays?’27 It was conceded that private gardens should not be overlooked. Immigration, too, began to become an issue. In 1956 an anonymous tenant urged action ‘before the flats are flooded with coloured people’.28 The South Acton Tenants Association was formed in 1960 because, as was said, ‘The people round here just do not know what is happening’.29

FIGURE 5.8, ABOVE Charles Hocking House (1965–7), with Blackmore and Kipling towers (1963–5) to the south, in 1967; demolished c.2012.

True tower blocks followed, largely as a result of central government subsidy rules and density obligations. The first, Jerome Tower (1962–3), of 16 storeys, was built with pride. On a spring Saturday in 1964, Acton Council issued tickets to the general public for access to its newly completed roof terrace – with an aerofoil, just for stylish fun.30 After local government reorganisation, several more towers and slabs were seen through on the estate’s east side (Figure 5.8). Thomas Norman I’Anson, Ealing Council’s first Borough Architect, was influenced here by the LCC’s slab blocks at Alton West, Roehampton. There was no landscaping to match that, but there was a deliberate and typical eradication of the old street pattern to separate vehicles and pedestrians for the sake of safety and amenity (Figures 5.1 and 5.2).31 A new shopping parade, Hardy Court, was welcomed in 1965 by resident Doris Swinfield, as ‘one of the finest things that 99

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES have ever happened down here in South Acton. The shops are clean and the service is much quicker now. I can remember queueing up for an hour in the old grocer’s shop, but shopping takes no time at all in the supermarket. I have lived here for 15 years and it is only now with the new shops and flats being built that the terrible stigma that has been over South Acton for years is being lifted. The area is becoming so much cleaner and more respectable.’ 32 With the Council under great political and demographic pressure to get more housing built, the mixed-development approach had broken down in the pursuit of volume. There were no more enclosed courts, rather a shift towards parallel ranks – the Zeilenbau approach. Densities were increasing, by virtue of the sheer size of the buildings, but the spaces between the blocks had also increased (otherwise the attempt to increase light would have been defeated). Open space was anyway still regarded as a virtue in and of itself.33 These changes, as much as changes in the elevational design and materials of the buildings, undermined whatever residual coherence there might have been in the continuing staged comprehensive redevelopment. As generous as the architecture was in terms of space, indoors and outdoors, upkeep was immediately a problem. Windows were leaky and uncleaned; the Council suggested tenants should clean them from the inside. ‘The Green has been left in a mess for six years’, one resident complained in 1963. ‘It is miserable to look out on.’34 There were also persistent grumbles about anti-social behaviour, litter, urination in lifts, and dogs fouling playgrounds. ‘Instead of living in pleasant and pretty surroundings the estate is being turned into slumland, caused by the “little darlings” [who] pull up the flowers by the roots … after the hard work and money spent by the Town Council.’35 In 1966, nearly 600 Hanbury Estate residents signed a petition protesting about lack of maintenance, especially to the lifts.36 One resident who was then a child has since reminisced, ‘It was a great place for children, but … it was one of the most dangerous places anybody could ever mess around in. It was like playing in a minefield. Whole streets derelict. All windows smashed, because it was us, the kids, who smashed them. Any plain glass that’s whole you pick up a stone and smash it, you see. We used to run in and out of the houses. We used to play run outs. No-one wants to be caught so you find any means of escape, so we were running around on the roofs.’37 Towers continued to be built, with three to the north that came to be known as the Castles (Corfe, Harlech and Beaumaris) completed in 1971. Cost-cutting from 1964 onwards, especially after the introduction of central government controls (yardsticks) in 1967, accelerated a decline in the quality of the housing. Minima became maxima.38 Densities in South Acton’s post-yardstick blocks rose to 138ppa, above the 1944 plan’s ‘inner suburban’ measure. By this time, and before the Ronan Point disaster of 1968, a reaction against towers had set in. First plans for the area north of Avenue Road, hitherto not regarded as part of South Acton, envisaged more high-rise in 1967. The scheme was repeatedly revised up to 1971, first to omit towers, but then gradually reinstating them to achieve necessary densities. What came to be called the ‘red brick’ was built with facings in that material in 1974–81 as a mostly low-rise post-Lillington Gardens warren. It was largely welcomed, some new residents still having previously lacked indoor baths and toilets.39 The estate as a whole had already been stigmatised. In 1973 Sir George Young, a Conservative representative for Ealing on the GLC who became MP for Acton from 1974 to 1997, sponsored a survey of tenants. Fewer than 20% responded, but, of those, 90% thought tower 100

CHAPTER FIVE PETER GUILLERY blocks were a mistake. The Acton Gazette splashed the headline ‘The Awful Truth About Life in Acton’s Tower Blocks – It’s sheer misery, say tenants in shock survey’.40 The newspaper followed up a year later with, ‘It’s hell – they want to get out: Caretakers’ wives tell of threats, filth and terrorism.’ Iris Fogelberg, wife of the caretaker of Barwick House, said: ‘The problem with South Acton now is that the wonderful old friendship has gone. It couldn’t have been kept, because when the council pulled down all the old houses, they had to build upwards on the space, to house the people. When that happened, you lost contact with your old next-door neighbours, the old pubs and shops disappeared, and everything changed. But what changed it all even more was that other people came to live in South Acton – people who weren’t born and bred here, and weren’t part of the community. That split it all up again and now there is very little community spirit.’41 Even in this tower-phobic context, ‘other people’ are represented as a bigger grievance than building heights, suggesting there was already the problem of what has been called ‘residualisation’.42 The implicit contract with the future that the great post-war building programme had made was that the results of its housing crusade, its investment, would be appreciated and nurtured. But social and housing policies changed and this did not happen. Finding money for expenditure on maintenance and management was increasingly difficult. It was a cruel irony for much of the nation’s council housing that heavy maintenance costs began to kick in heavily in the 1970s just as there was a shift away from large-scale public investment. Attempts at improvement followed, but these were doomed by a fundamental lack of investment in maintenance and repair through the 1980s and 1990s. South Acton was addressed in a report of 1977 commissioned by Young from Simon Morris, a student member of the Tory Reform Group. The report chronicled the extent of crime, vandalism, poor maintenance, anti-social noise and racial problems, though overlooked contrary evidence such as tenant rotas to clean common areas, allegedly without interviewing either those then defined as ‘black’ tenants or council officers. Having recommended reduced densities, it concluded: ‘The root cause of the estate’s troubles appears to be that it is socially fluid, and does not form a community. The tower blocks do not possess the same social pattern or cohesion as the streets they replaced. The tenants do not feel responsible for the public areas, or what happens there, and those living on different floors are often strangers to each other. ‘43 This reflects the influence of Oscar Newman’s Defensible Space: People and Design in the Violent City (1972), which blamed architectural design for increases in criminal activity. But again it is social fluidity (residualisation), not the buildings, that is said to be the ‘root cause’ of ‘troubles.’ Sadly less influential than Newman, though more insightful, was the observation in 1974 from Colin Ward, then education officer at the Town and Country Planning Association, that ‘It won’t work without dweller control … The only solution I can see to the malaise of the municipal estate is to transform it into a co-operative housing society.’44 In 1979, insensitively following Newman’s suggested strategies rather than Ward’s, Ealing Council brought in the National Association for the Care and Rehabilitation of Offenders to advise on defensible space. Security was repeatedly thereafter readdressed (Figure 5.9). 101

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES In considering adaptations and alterations to buildings it should first be acknowledged that an absence of alterations tends to reflect a kind of sustainability, or at least inhabitability. On the other hand, interventions, sometimes serial, do not necessarily reflect more than perceived failure or uninhabitability. Negative perceptions have in themselves undermined sustainability, most notably in tower blocks. Inadequate maintenance and management created an impression of inflexibility, and a vicious circle in which piecemeal and half-hearted alterations chased solutions to problems that need not have been allowed to get out of hand. In 1999 Clive Soley, Acton’s Labour MP, said, ‘There were too many false starts in the past and not surprisingly, residents became cynical.’45 Crime remained an external preoccupation. Yet over time, and for many in late twentieth-century South Acton, social and racial mix became itself a source of security and safety. ‘I’ve never felt threatened … if you’re living in it you don’t see it that way. You see it as your neighbours, friends … you don’t see it as a place of danger. [South Acton is] perceived in a horrible way by other people who don’t live here.’46 There had been ‘phases of different countries coming in. Every time a new country starts sending their people in the animosity changes to the next race.’47 Starting in the 1960s, a new kind of separation had developed – one in which immigration was only an incidental scapegoat. Redevelopment had hastened the end of the area’s selfsufficiency; industry and jobs had moved away. The old houses had themselves been stigmatised, but in some respects the new housing intensified the area’s impoverishment. Poorer and often unemployed people arrived, and shops and pubs declined, for local and wider reasons. The strangulation of streets, intended to make the area safer, ensured a degree of quiet, but quickly became unpopular and reinforced the already existing impermeability. Despite the enduring consciousness of South Acton as a distinct place, people sometimes perceived their own neighbourhood within the estate positively, while viewing other neighbouring localities negatively.48 The deliberate intricacies of the 1970s ‘red brick’ came to be especially disdained – ‘it is an almost impenetrable maze to those unfamiliar with it’.49

FIGURE 5.9, ABOVE Harlech Tower entrance, built 1968–71, enclosed 1980–2, and further altered in 1989–90 and 2002–3. 102

South Acton had unintentionally been transformed from a place characterised by diversity of use in a relatively uniform built environment to one with a diverse built environment sustaining

CHAPTER FIVE PETER GUILLERY uniformity of use. The clear differences between housing types and the absence of overall architectural integration arose not by design, but from the protracted and stuttering realisation of post-war plans. The extension across 30 years of what had been intended as a ten year ‘comprehensive redevelopment’ programme – for reasons that are not at all peculiar to South Acton – increased the impact of changes in central regulation and architectural design. The post-war redevelopment of South Acton had taken 30 years to see through. Less than 20 years later, another comprehensive fresh start was seen as necessary. In 1996 plans for what was called ‘comprehensive regeneration’ were brought forward. The first fruit was a neo-vernacular row of four-bedroom houses on Bollo Bridge Road, built for the Ealing Family Housing Association (later part of the Catalyst Housing Group) with SARAG, and John Thompson and Partners as architects. In 2002–4, the same parties minus SARAG replaced 21-storey Barrie House with more low-rise housing. Meanwhile Ealing Council began work on an Urban Design Framework and appointed masterplan architects, ECD Architects and Proctor and Matthews. The result was an outline plan for a five-phase ‘fundamental overhaul’ of the estate to make it a new ‘high-density urban quarter’. It envisaged selective demolition, new mixed-tenure housing and higher overall densities. Ealing Homes (an Arm’s Length Management Organisation) was formed to manage all Ealing Council’s housing from 2004. There things stood at the time of the English Heritage and Fluid reports of 2005. If any lessons were drawn from that work by those responsible for the forward movement of ‘comprehensive regeneration’, they did not lead to a more conservative approach. In 2009 Ealing initiated a new round of masterplanning through HTA Design; as the Council’s website relates, ‘Acton Gardens (a collaboration between L&Q, one of the largest housing associations in the UK, and house-builder Countryside Properties) won a competitive competition to become the council’s developer partner in 2010, and a widely-consulted “master plan” to guide future development was given the go-ahead in 2012 after one of the most comprehensive consultation programmes of its type.’ Complete replacement of the post-war housing had emerged as the preferred approach and the redevelopment programme was extended – the new ten-phase masterplan for around 2,500 homes designed by a number of eminent architects now anticipates completion in 2026. Once again, what had begun as a ten-year project had been recalibrated to take 30 years. Redevelopment south of Bollo Bridge Road was seen through by Catalyst (Communities Housing Association) to form the Liberty Quarter; the freeholds of the sites yet to be redeveloped were to transfer to the London & Quadrant Housing Trust in phases, and South Acton thus moved on to a multiple landlord future. HTA’s mixed-tenure redevelopment of the Hanbury Estate, ‘Phase 5’ of Acton Gardens, began in 2015 (Figure 5.10). Overall, half of the new housing is forecast to be ‘affordable’, the other half not – though for many South Acton residents, as across London, what is deemed ‘affordable’ is in fact not. While this ratio of ‘affordability’ is good by the standards of early twenty-first-century London, it means that if the redevelopment is seen through, South Acton will have around 900 fewer affordable dwellings than it did in its council housing, for an overall gain of only about 350 homes. A large mural, Big Mother by Stik, depicting a mother and child 125 ft tall, arrived in 2014 to grace the end wall of Charles Hocking House, scheduled to be demolished in 2017, and to comment on housing provision. The artist has said: ‘Affordable housing in Britain is under threat, this piece is to 103

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES remind the world that all people need homes,’ and ‘I won’t get any more commissions from Ealing Council, that’s for sure.’50

CONCLUSION South Acton’s first development was a product of Victorian Liberal and democratising capitalism. A strong social fabric resulted, but private ownership allowed built fabric to decay. Post-war socialism replaced the built fabric to uphold the social fabric, but in the absence of follow-through both suffered, though not without resilience. Neoliberalism is now replacing the built fabric and transforming the social fabric. The latest masterplan aspires to the creation of a sense of place, to open spaces and to distinct character areas – all of which already existed. South Acton has been in almost constant flux, and will have been, ‘comprehensively’ so, for 60 of the 80 years up to 2026. Yet it had until recently also kept a continually distinctive and separate identity. Much of the area’s historical character and many of its perceived strengths derived from its relative isolation and long-standing impermeability. The notion of community, always questionable, can be rooted in class or ethnicity; underneath, however, it frequently and obviously has a topographical sense. If strongly felt this can override other more divisive and identity-based senses, and cope with social fluidity. That happened in South Acton, in part precisely because of outside stigmatisation. If a place is opened up, its separate history eradicated, perceptions of community will abandon topography and retreat to other identities, not least class. Oppositional conservationism in this context is not about the preservation of artefacts, but the mediation of change in everyday social environments for continuity and solidarity.

FIGURE 5.10, ABOVE Hanbury Estate demolition, 2015. 104

That, at least, had been our hope, and our work was for the most part well received. Local exhibitions, walkabouts and lectures elicited comments like, ‘Learning a bit about the history of the blocks themselves, you do start looking for certain things, you just start thinking.’51 But it would be naive to claim that our characterisation met the high ideals posted on the English Heritage website. With breathtaking cynicism, a councillor welcomed the study as affirming that the Council was heading in the right direction because English Heritage made no recommendations for listing – hoist with our own corporate petard.

CHAPTER FIVE PETER GUILLERY Disjunctions of architectural scale, materials and forms can be enjoyed for their drama, or decried for their dissonance. But the substantial difference in scale between pre- and post-war buildings is not fundamentally a matter of taste or style; it was the result of a consistent commitment through the comprehensive redevelopment period to the introduction to the area of open space without a reduction in population density. This was only slowly and painfully achieved – a point that it seemed vital should be appreciated in 2005 if the even greater difficulties inherent in intended increases in density alongside the maintenance of green space and a reduction of architectural scale were to be confronted. Questions about density and mixed tenure that were being posed then were remarkably similar to those posed half a century earlier, but lacked awareness of the precedent. These questions still hang heavy and there are already complaints about reductions in indoor space and light, as well as of poor maintenance, from those recently rehoused south of Bollo Bridge Road.52 A long historical view of South Acton shows the present ‘regeneration’ to be just the latest phase in an almost continuous sequence of restless and deliberate subversions of sustainability, similar in their desire for new building, but reconditioned by ideological shifts within capitalist frameworks. Whatever the complications of tax regimes, energy efficiency, mixed tenure, densification, space standards, or affordability, if sustainability means anything it must mean making what exists work, whatever its flaws – in other words, maintenance. In attempts at renewal mistakes are inevitable, now as much as then; technological, environmental, social and political change in the next 30 years will render what is being built now obsolescent, or seemingly so, until and unless there is a basic acceptance that to keep replacing buildings and displacing people is itself unsustainable. ‘Capital loathes the old, for anchoring us in the reality of the lived’53 – or, to quote Ruskin again, ‘I cannot but think it an evil sign of a people when their houses are built to last for one generation only.’54 Since our survey, redevelopment has proceeded with scant regard to history: neither to the built environment it supplies, nor to the lessons it teaches. Yet more than 40 years after Colin Ward first saw the need, SARAG moved on to spark the transfer of control of aspects of a shrinking estate (including the public realm) to the tenants themselves, establishing South Acton Community Builders Co-operative Ltd, a Tenants’ Management Organisation (and one of ten national Guide TMOs). Historical awareness played a role in building impetus for that, and has been a seed in discussions with tenants of estates elsewhere. More than ten years on, our survey is seen and used as a point of educational reference, as in an annual ‘Ruskinian Walk through Shared Heritage’. SCBC could yet play a role in holding South Acton together. In the face of such great forces, that is how and where housing history can be mobilised: to bear witness and to shift incrementally the way places are perceived, working towards a future in which architectural imagination can align positively with social justice and self-determination.

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CHAPTER SIX GENTRIFICATION: THE CASE OF CANONBURY, 1850 TO 1975 TANIS HINCHCLIFFE

The term ‘gentrification’ was allegedly coined by sociologist Ruth Glass in her introduction to the 1964 publication, London: Aspects of Change, where in an almost throwaway remark, she referred to the profound changes occurring in some areas of working class London as ‘gentrification’.1 She observed: ‘Once this process of “gentrification” starts in a district, it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working class occupiers are displaced, and the whole social character of the district is changed.’ ‘Gentrification’, and the transformation of formerly working class neighbourhoods to middle class occupation, has been considered both good and bad. For estate agents, any area appearing to gentrify is good, as house prices will rise accordingly; for the same reason, housing campaigners view gentrification with alarm, since it is bound to drive out those least able to pay the rising rents. This transformation has been going on for at least 60 years, and has now become so commonplace in London that it is in some respects surprising that it continues to be commented upon. So why should we be concerned, and is there any light that the history of the process can shed on our housing situation today? Although gentrification is a phenomenon seen in many cities across the world, the housing stock in London gives a peculiar cast to the process here. In her introduction Glass noted that the East End of London, the traditional home of the working classes, had at that time remained exempt from gentrification. The shabby districts of Chelsea and Hampstead had already been transformed, and the ‘invasion’ of the middle classes was spreading into Paddington, North Kensington, and Islington. The latter borough came to be regarded as the exemplar of gentrification in London, and Canonbury was considered the place where it all began. It is, then, instructive to review the history of Canonbury, looking for characteristics which may have led to its early gentrification, and this is the purpose of this chapter. What happened in Canonbury encouraged gentrification in the rest of the borough, but did the ward enjoy a peculiar dynamic which made it distinct from other parts of Islington?

WHERE AND WHAT WAS CANONBURY? In other cities of Europe and North America, gentrification tends to take place in former industrial areas of the cities, and along waterfronts no longer used for commerce. London’s gentrification began in the low-rise housing stock peculiar to the capital. This stock was what made London ‘the 107

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FIGURE 6.1, ABOVE Map of Canonbury, Islington. 108

CHAPTER SIX TANIS HINCHCLIFFE Unique City’, in the words of Steen Eiler Rasmussen in his 1937 publication:2 instead of the blocks of flats common to the continental cities, all around the City of London and the West End lay street after street of low density, terraced houses, dating from the eighteenth century through to the early years of the twentieth. The Canonbury estate in Islington was developed with residential building along the same lines as most other areas of the borough. Unusually for Islington, however, the estate was owned by a landed family, the Comptons of Northampton, and it had been in their hands since the early seventeenth century. The property comprised approximately 100 acres bounded by Upper Street and Lower Road (Essex Road) to the west and east, Cross Street to the south and Hopping Lane (St Paul’s Road) on the north (Figure 6.1). A distinctive feature of the estate was that it boasted a sixteenth-century tower house and walled garden of great historic interest: Canonbury House, about the only ancient building the borough could claim. The area remained semi-rural and a retreat from city life for two hundred years, enhanced by a section of the New River meandering through, from north to south. In 1770, John Dawes, a local man, began to alter Canonbury House by dismantling parts and dividing others into distinct dwellings. The brick tower and corner of the old house remained, and ensured that at its centre Canonbury retained a connection to its past that would prove invaluable in the future (Figure 6.2).

FIGURE 6.2, ABOVE Canonbury Tower, Islington, William Bolton, c.1509–32.

The development of Canonbury as a residential area began in earnest at the start of the nineteenth century, and although progress was uneven, over the first 30 years of the new century terraces of varying sizes in the characteristic Islington style were built between Upper Street and Canonbury Road. The estate could have continued along the same lines adopted in Barnsbury and on the Clothworkers’ estate behind the Angel but for Charles Hamor Hill. In 1837 he made an agreement with the Marquess of Northampton for a large northern portion of the estate, and proceeded slowly to turn this into a ‘park estate’ of detached and semi-detached houses with generous front and back gardens.3 The result was two long curving streets, Canonbury Park North and South, as well as Canonbury Park Square (Alwyne Square) and Grange Grove. While it took nearly 20 years to complete the development, the houses proved popular with the growing middle class (Figure 6.3). Hill’s initiative in Canonbury was to prove important, because it 109

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES ensured that the area assumed a less dense and more green aspect than that of the usual terraced streets of Islington. In 1847, James Wagstaff took the land immediately to the south of Canonbury Tower, and here he oversaw the erection of some grand houses in Alwyne Road. The east side of the estate was completed with semi-detached villas in Clephane and Marquess Roads, and with terraces in the modest streets off Essex Road and Upper Street. By the 1870s the estate was largely built over, and it could be distinguished from other parts of Islington by the historic tower house at its centre, its grand Canonbury Square, and its park estate of detached and semi-detached villas. One of the classic features of gentrification is the transfer of status from working class to middle class. This can be easily seen when industrial areas, such as the factories and warehouses of Lower Manhattan, lose their function and are taken over by middle class refurbishment and reuse.4 In London’s inner suburbs the process was somewhat different, since the nineteenth-century housing ripe for post-war gentrification started life as housing for middle- and lowermiddle class families. This was certainly the case in those areas in Canonbury developed by Charles Hamor Hill around Canonbury Park North and South, where a quick trawl through the 1871 Census shows that the population was solidly middle class.5 In the 193 houses occupied, 74% of heads were male, and of these most were engaged in commercial activities, as merchants or merchants’ assistants. Some were professionals or civil servants, and a few were doctors. The 26% female heads tended to live off income or were landladies. In Booth’s map, the whole of Canonbury is solidly red or ‘well-to-do, middle class,’ with some pink (‘fairly comfortable’) between Canonbury Road and Upper Street.6

FIGURE 6.3, ABOVE Canonbury Park South, developed by Charles Hamor Hill from 1837. 110

Islington had always been a mixture of classes, with some smart areas such as Highbury and Tufnell Park, and some more liminal such as Barnsbury, where a working class population gradually occupied more and more of the terraced houses. In addition, the middle class population of the inner suburbs was dropping – a general trend noticeable from the 1911 Census as improved transport, the building boom in the outer suburbs, and cheap mortgages there drew people out to a modern middle class life.7 This movement gave working class people the opportunity to spread out from the cramped courts of poor housing into the larger, neighbouring houses vacated by the middle classes, and

CHAPTER SIX TANIS HINCHCLIFFE observers of the social scene were quick to note the change of status from middle class to working class in metropolitan boroughs such as Paddington, St Pancras, and Islington.

INTER-WAR CANONBURY During the 1930s the population of Islington began an absolute decline, and in 1934 The Islington Gazette noted a net loss in those on the Electoral Register, suggesting that the ‘attraction of the suburbs’ could be the chief factor, although the move by inner-London industries to better premises on the periphery would also have been a factor.8 The result was that letting houses was less and less profitable, and as more houses were let as individual rooms, overcrowding and poor conditions became prevalent. But was it just the draw of the suburban semis that caused the desperate dilapidation of the housing stock in Islington and the other inner suburbs? Housing low-paid workers is always problematic since there are no profits to be made, and this was especially so in the inter-war years. In order to stabilise the economy and safeguard the income of the middle class, successive governments encouraged a low wage regime,9 and one measure to ensure this was the retention after the First World War of rent restriction legislation. The original Rent Restriction Act 1915 had been introduced to prevent wartime profiteering by guaranteeing that tenants in property under a certain value had the right to a regulated rent as long as they were in possession of their tenancy. As the Act was renewed and time went on, the children of tenants could inherit the tenancy without a rise in rent if they were in residence when their parent died. The result was that the tenancy became the most valuable property right working class people owned, leading to a stagnation of the market in rented property as people hung on to their tenancies whatever the condition of their dwelling.10 Throughout the inter-war years there were many properties on very low rents, bringing in only a poor return to their landlords. Small landlords, since they could not raise rents, were unable to maintain their houses, nor were they able to put in amenities such as modern plumbing, electricity, and appliances. Because they were on low wages, the tenants needed the cheap rents, and the landlords needed undemanding, poor tenants. At the end of the Second World War, the condition of housing in working class areas of the inner suburbs was very poor – not just because of the bombing and the five years of neglect, but also because of the previous 20 years of low rents. Although the transformation was inexorable, it was gradual. There was not a dramatic change for the landlords of the inner suburbs, except that the income from their property went into a noticeable decline. The inter-war housing market in the older boroughs was quite complex, with different types of tenancies, depending on the income of the tenants. On the one hand, ground landlords, such as the Marquess of Northampton, had blocks of property for sale leasehold, with the prospect of an income from the rents for the new owner. On the other hand, the estate themselves let individual properties of the kind which would appeal to a middle class clientele: ‘Attractive Detached Residence on the Marquess of Northampton’s Canonbury Estate, Islington; quiet and select position; 5 bedrooms, 4 reception rooms, bath room, and usual offices, on 2 floors; good garden. Rent £100 per annum. – Apply Agent; 19 Northampton-square EC1.’ 11 An advertisement such as this was aimed at the middle class, and no contradiction was seen in the different markets in rented rooms, flats and houses in close proximity to each other. One of the

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MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES middle class residents of Canonbury was Ronald Carton, a journalist who was on the editorial staff of The Times, and had been editor of Country Life since 1937. The Cartons lived at 5 Canonbury Place, close to Canonbury Tower, described in his obituary of 1960 as a ‘delightful, old, countrylike house with its big garden that they had in Canonbury (many years before that London village became fashionable).’12 The houses around Canonbury Tower could be described as a special case since they were not just secluded, they were of acknowledged historical interest and they had easy access through rail and bus to the City and the West End. At the same time Canonbury also participated in the growing working class culture in Islington, which ultimately led to a decline and devaluation of the housing stock. The Post Office Directories bear witness to the many small businesses that were woven into the fabric of Canonbury, and in 1936 a ‘modern’ factory in Canonbury Street was up for sale.13 Before the Second World War it would appear that the character of the area became split between the streets to the north of the New River, including Canonbury Park North and South, and the properties along Canonbury and Essex Roads, and behind Upper Street. Here many of the properties were described in the Directories as ‘apartments’. Some of these could be in an appalling condition. One such property in Douglas Road was reported to Islington Council’s Housing Committee in the autumn of 1931:14 the tenant of the basement had sub-let two rooms to a Mr Pannell, his wife and six daughters at 15s. per week; three of the teenage daughters slept in the smaller room, under the stairs, a space measuring 7 x 6 ft, which was 6 ft high and had no ventilation except for a small vent in a riser of the stair. The Pannells had lived there eight years and had not been able to find somewhere better to live. The Northampton Estate did show interest in working with Islington Council to improve the condition of their housing stock. In 1919, when the Council was searching for sites for their flat-building initiative under the new Housing Act, the Medical Officer of Health met with the Marquess’ agent concerning houses in Halton Road which were in such a dilapidated condition that he thought they should be demolished.15 These subsequently were replaced by Halton Mansions, one of the Council’s first purpose-built estates of flats. Although during the 1920s the Marquess of Northampton himself converted houses in Compton Terrace and Canonbury Square into self-contained flats, he was not averse to council housing on his estate, and in certain circumstances positively encouraged it. In 1928 he sought the Council’s assistance in rearranging his property behind Upper Street, and ultimately the Council was able to build Wakelin House in 1935, which they linked to the slum clearance of nearby Church Lane, close to St Mary’s Church.16 Later, in 1937, the Council had their eye on a block of five acres between St Paul’s Road and Canonbury Place, but the Marquess claimed he had his own plans for this site. In the end the Council took a total of seven sites comprising about 12 acres on the south side of Canonbury, but nothing was built here until after the Second World War.17 This did ensure, however, that a substantial area of Canonbury was ultimately given over to council housing, and in addition the Northampton Trust themselves built three blocks of flats to rehouse their tenants from Clerkenwell.

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THE GENTRIFICATION PROCESS After the Second World War, the consensus was that something positive could now be done about the condition of the housing stock in inner London, and local authorities were given the task of carrying this out. The amount of new housing produced was certainly impressive, but some of the effects on the housing market were as unexpected as those that had resulted from the Rent Restriction Acts. With the continuing fall in the inner London population through migration to New Towns and overspill estates, the local authorities were given powers to compulsorily purchase large areas of what they considered derelict housing for redevelopment. The policy disrupted the local market by putting large numbers of terraced houses out of use while the local authority waited until they had accumulated enough land for a viable estate. Otherwise, they let the properties on short-term tenancies while their plans ripened, and the houses deteriorated further.18 The effects of this policy could be seen in parts of Barnsbury, particularly down from Liverpool Road to King’s Cross. Landlords expecting the Council to buy up their property were also loath to spend money on their houses, and would leave them empty rather than repairing them. At the same time there was a continuing housing shortage, with people waiting years to be rehoused and a growing awareness that much of the old housing stock was unfit for modern conditions. It would seem that local authorities thought they had all the time in the world to bring their housing plans to fruition, but they had not counted on new entrants into the local housing markets – the influx of the owner-occupiers. Landlords, wanting to get out of the letting business, were only too willing to sell their houses to individuals, able to buy a house for refurbishment and occupation by themselves or other owner-occupiers. Relaxation of the rules for letting through the Rent Act 1957 and generous improvement grants opened the way for others to upgrade their property into high-rent flats. After a few years of unbelievable bargains in the 1950s, house prices began to rise, and eventually reached a level local authorities were unable to match. At this point, the movement of middle class home owners into the formerly working class areas of the inner suburbs became an accepted fact, along with acknowledgement of the profits that could be made. The remaining poor and elderly working class and new immigrants, who had once been left to negotiate the local housing market among themselves, were now in competition with the better resourced middle class for the same housing stock. If the working classes were experiencing changing circumstances, so were the middle classes. After the First World War the expansion of the suburbs on cheap agricultural land gave an alternative to inner-city living. After the Second World War the newly established Green Belt prevented suburban house-building on such a vast scale within easy commuting distance of central London. The inter-war suburbs were still occupied by their original residents, but at the same time many young people who had taken advantage of the post-war expansion in higher education were descending on London with the hope of getting work in television, journalism, design and in more traditional middle class professions. Already priced out of Chelsea and Hampstead as noted by Glass, they looked to the boroughs further east in Kentish and Camden Towns and in Islington. The social consequences of this worsened the shortage of housing for essential service workers. As Father Paul Byrne, Director of the Shelter Housing Aid Centre, observed, those working in the service industries could no longer compete on the open housing 113

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES market with ‘the dolly birds’.19 On the other hand, the middle class professionals had fewer choices than imagined, and as Margaret Watson (later Hodge and before she was an Islington Councillor) said in the same report: ‘I’m just as guilty, being a middle class person sitting here but … well, I feel we needed a home.’20 In 1937 the Marquess of Northampton intimated to Islington Council that he had plans for his Canonbury estate, and at the end of the war he called on the services of the architect Louis de Soissons, designer of Welwyn Garden City, for a scheme that would initially replace bomb damaged houses, and then the surrounding streets. Small houses were built in Grange Road and Canonbury Parks North and South, from 1946, in a pleasing neo-Georgian style, using bricks and wood from the destroyed houses (Figure 6.4).21 The scheme dried up after only 28 houses were completed, perhaps because it became apparent that the task of refurbishment was beyond the resources available to the Marquess and the Northampton Estate. In the spring of 1951 he sold a good portion of his Canonbury estate to two property companies: the area to the east and south of the New River was bought by Oriel Property Trust, while the northern and western portion, including Canonbury Square, was taken by Western Ground Rents.22 This left the Northampton Estate with the tower house and a few of the surrounding streets. During the 1950s, gentrification in Islington was almost unknown, for the reason that it was very difficult to get a mortgage on such doubtful properties. As PR Williams has put it, ‘Until the late 1950s and early 1960s there existed a financial void in Islington … the larger building societies, banks and insurance companies were very reluctant to make any loans at all in this area’.23 The financial arrangements of the two property companies provided Canonbury with another opportunity to distinguish itself from the rest of the borough: by actively engaging in the market through refurbishment, new-build and mortgages, they were able to encourage middle class migration to the estate before anyone else had dreamed Islington could attract such people. They also turned the profits from the process into lucrative investments for their associated financial institutions. The two companies purchasing the Canonbury sites present an intriguing insight into the workings of the property market at this time. Western Ground Rents was an offshoot of Shop Investments, a property company set up in 1932 by Francis B Winham, an estate agent, in order to buy up the ground rents of commercial property in the suburbs of London. Western Ground Rents was established in 1938 specifically to buy the Marquess of Bute’s Mountjoy Estate in Cardiff, thus making the company a prime landlord in the centre of that city.24 Oriel Property Trust was incorporated in 1937, and its chairman, David Haldin Davis, was a Director of Shop Investments, so although the latter did not acquire Oriel Property Trust until 1957, there had always been a link between the two companies.25 Western Ground Rents and Oriel Property Trust kept a low profile, as did Francis Winham and his brother Cyril, until the 1960s, when it was realised with some amazement that they had acquired a sizable empire of properties. They were pioneers in a new method of finance, which became more common in the post-war property boom. When Western Ground Rents bought the Mountjoy Estate, they had the help of two insurance companies, the Clerical, Medical and General Assurance Society, managed by Andrew Rowell, and the Equity and Law Life Assurance Society, whose chairman was Lord Kennet.26 In 1939, Equity and Law took a controlling interest in 114

CHAPTER SIX TANIS HINCHCLIFFE Western Ground Rents, and provided the capital for further acquisitions. In 1948, insurance company Clerical, Medical and General, still under Rowell’s management, bought a controlling interest in Oriel Property Trust. Rowell was apparently the brains behind the linkage of insurance with property, and by 1958 he was the chairman of the parent company, Shop Investments.27 The three companies – Western Ground Rents, Oriel Property Trust, and Shop Investments – shared an address in Queen Street, Mayfair, and their business was handled by Royds’ Estate Agents, managed by the Winhams and by Wigram Solicitors, also of Queen Street. They were obviously a tightly integrated operation. Besides commercial property acquired by Shop Investments, the Winhams bought sites in Chelsea and Pimlico, as was disclosed by The Observer in December 1961: ‘The Winhams’ great achievement was to see the prospects for the ring of nineteenth-century districts round central London. A string of private companies and trusts in which the Winhams have interests has acquired and developed three such areas, once part of aristocratic estates: Canonbury, which used to be the Comptons’; ‘World’s End’, which used to be the Sloane Stanley Estate, and a chunk of Pimlico, once part of the Grosvenor Estate.’28 The Winhams seem to have had a predilection for aristocratic property (although this was probably an opportunistic move, given the state of aristocratic finances after the war). Also in 1961, while their attention was caught by the activities of Western Ground Rents in Cardiff, The Observer noted: ‘The Winhams are also connected with Royds and Co., the firm of estate agents which has become well-known as among those who have most successfully developed out-lying areas of central London for middle class buyers especial in Islington (on the Canonbury Estate), in Pimlico and West Chelsea.’29 Thus it was recognised that the Winhams were not only involved in property dealing, but also with the active increase in the value of their acquisitions by means of a potential middle class market for whom they supplied the all-important mortgages.30

FIGURE 6.4, ABOVE House in Canonbury Park South by Louis de Soissons, 1951.

Western Ground Rents continued the redevelopment of their property that the Marquess began but abandoned before selling up. First off was a collection of houses and flats for married police officers and later a hostel for single men (Figure 6.5).31 Small houses and flats in a modest neo-Georgian style 115

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES then replaced the older houses, in a section bounded by St Paul’s Road, St Mary’s and Grange Roads, with an attractive terrace by Raymond Erith facing Canonbury Place. In 1965 The Observer noted that ‘Western Ground Rents have built over 170 houses and flats in the area in the last seven years. A further 80 flats are going up and all are sold.’32 Evidence given to the Milner Holland Commission by one of the property companies concerned Canonbury, and the progressive refurbishment of property there.33 The representative, who possibly spoke for Oriel Property Trust, explained that as properties became vacant they were refurbished and let on long leases; to facilitate this practice, they would decant tenants from one property into a partially inhabited one, or rehouse them in property off the estate, but nearby. There seemed perfect logic in this policy, until the Commission considered the implications for those who had been moved on. It registered that the working class element in the area was being eroded and prices were inevitably rising. It should be noted, however, that even in Canonbury Park South the Council managed to build two small blocks of working class flats, Marie Curie House and Lilian Bayliss House. External factors impinged on the business of the two companies when the Leasehold Reform Act 1967 meant that it was now open to leaseholders to buy or extend their leases. This may have led to the Oriel Property Trust selling a large part of their Canonbury property in 1966 for £1,150,000.34 The cleared land would go to form Islington Council’s Marquess Road Estate by Darbourne and Darke. When Francis Winham died in 1968, Shop Investments was sold to Amalgamated Investment and Property, and it was assumed that they would also buy Western Ground Rents. What actually happened was that it was bought by BP Pensions in the spring of 1969 – an event claimed in the press to be without precedent.35 In September 1969, David Pinto incorporated Rushclose, and he seems to have taken over the rump of Oriel Property Trust’s interests in Canonbury. By this time, Canonbury was well accepted as a middle class enclave in Islington, despite the fact that a good half of the original estate was now occupied by Council flats.

FIGURE 6.5, ABOVE Police houses and flats, Canonbury, by WS Grice and SJ Hanchet, 1952. 116

By attracting Western Ground Rents and Oriel Property Trust, the Canonbury estate drew in the sort of investment needed to refurbish the area to the extent that it would attract not just a few eccentric artistic middle class householders. Lack of investment was the bane of the older inner suburbs: low rents prevented repairs and upgraded amenities, leading to a cycle of

CHAPTER SIX TANIS HINCHCLIFFE decline. Only when mortgage providers had the confidence to lend on older properties did the tide turn for certain acceptable houses in a borough such as Islington. Canonbury led the way, but it enjoyed advantages over other areas, firstly by having houses attractive enough to entice a middle class clientele and secondly by having two ground landlords with the foresight to develop their asset in a consistent manner. The close proximity to Council flats did not seem to detract from the character of Canonbury as it did elsewhere, and it may even have been an advantage when the landlords sought alternative accommodation for their sitting tenants. In 1961, The Guardian was able to comment on ‘the most extraordinary postwar renaissance in Canonbury … it is now one of the smartest, pleasantest and most convenient villages of inner London.’36 Describing Canonbury as a ‘village’ fitted in very well with the cultural construction of the inner suburbs of London during the 1960s and 70s. Often it was suggested that London was a collection of villages, each with its own character. When the Barnsbury Society wanted to advance its position in Islington in the face of threatened redevelopment by the LCC, they put forward a refurbishment programme by David Wager, which included a ‘village centre’ at the top of Barnsbury Road where five roads met.37 Whether this artificial centre would have worked was never tried, but it bears witness to the belief that such a centre was needed to make an area ‘go’, and it underlines the importance of the area of Canonbury around the tower which formed a natural centre of the ward. Besides a parade of shops, there was a community hall, donated by the then Marquess of Northampton in 1907. From 1952 to 2003, the hall and Tower provided the home for the Tavistock Repertory theatre, an important cultural addition to the life of the area. Despite its secluded ‘village’ atmosphere, Canonbury benefited from the opening in 1968 of the new Victoria underground line and its nearby station at Highbury and Islington, but was also lucky when plans for the motorway box along St Paul’s Road were scrapped.

FIGURE 6.6, ABOVE Houses in Canonbury Place, by Raymond Erith, 1963–70.

Alongside the efforts of Louis de Soissons and the Marquess to reinstate Canonbury as a desirable residence, there is evidence that after the war there was still a good deal of dereliction. Much is made of George Orwell coming to Canonbury Square in 1944 after he and his wife were bombed out of their flat in Kilburn. There is disagreement among his biographers whether the Canonbury flat was situated in a slum – certainly, however, from 117

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES descriptions in letters it would seem that the area was run down.38 After a decade of refurbishment, the Daily Herald could celebrate the arrival in Canonbury of a number of ‘intellectual, artistic and professional people’.39 These included Sir Philip Hendy, Director of the National Gallery; Sir Dennis Proctor, Director of the Tate; and, more famously, Sir Basil Spence, the architect of Coventry Cathedral, whose involvement in the area points up an important aspect of gentrification, the proprietorial ownership of an area by its middle class residents. In 1956 Spence took a house at 1 Canonbury Place for his office and home, and maintained an interest in the amenities of the area. When at the end of the 1960s the Marquess of Northampton sought to redevelop land bounded by ‘the Alwynes’ (Alwyne Road, Villas and Place), he turned to Spence. Spence and his son-in-law, Anthony Blee, produced a scheme which would provide 14 houses and 30 flats in a modern configuration, but one they thought was totally in accord with the surrounding area (Figure 6.6).40 The local reaction was more violent than anyone might have expected and was based on several different points. First there was the argument that the new houses would be out of place in terms of style and scale. Secondly, there was an anticipated loss of a stand of mature trees which provided a green space although inaccessible to the public. Third and most important was the principle that houses in a conservation area as defined by the 1967 Civic Amenities Act should be safeguarded from demolition, despite the fact that they were not individually listed. Very vocal residents started a ‘Save the Alwynes’ campaign, and the Canonbury Society was established to fight the proposals (Figure 6.7).

FIGURE 6.7, ABOVE ‘The Alwynes,’ Alwyne Villas, Canonbury, developed by James Wagstaff from 1847. 118

An article in The Guardian by Judy Hillman in November 1970 alerted readers to the consequences of Spence and Blee’s scheme, and the efforts made by Islington Council to place a building preservation notice on the endangered property.41 This request was refused by the then environment minister, Peter Walker, who gave the reason that the houses were not distinguished enough to be protected. Similarly, in a letter to the editor of The Times in February 1972, Basil Spence took issue with those who decried his scheme for the Alwynes and objected to the disruption of the conservation area.42 He argued that the houses that would be demolished to make way for the new scheme were Victorian and therefore had no architectural

CHAPTER SIX TANIS HINCHCLIFFE merit, so they should not be considered an indispensible part of the character of the area, which was Georgian: ‘I would suggest that the ambience of Canonbury does not derive its life blood from the bulky Victorian villas, but from their properly preserved Georgian neighbours and from the trees, all of which are listed’, he wrote. This sentiment belonged to a former time when anything ‘Georgian’ was acceptable, but anything ‘Victorian’ was considered outside the bounds of taste. Architectural commentators such as Tony Aldous, Ian Nairn, Simon Jenkins and Stephen Gardiner weighed into the controversy. The GLC’s Historic Buildings Board supported the objectors, and an amendment to the Civic Amenities Act was proposed to ensure that unlisted buildings would be protected if they contributed to the conservation area. The Spence/Blee scheme was dropped shortly after the publicity, but the Alwynes was an important test case, since it strengthened the argument for the amendment, and gave the conservation lobby a stronger hand in dealing with development schemes. The amendment also meant that those gentrifiers who had bought houses in conservation areas could rest assured that their property would not be devalued by what they considered inappropriate demolition and redevelopment. The vocal ‘ownership’ of their neighbourhood had prevailed. An altogether different effect of gentrification was illustrated in a case that came up in 1973. Islington Council tried to block planning permission for Rushclose Developments – the company that took over the remains of Oriel Property Trust’s Canonbury interests – to convert some Victorian houses into small flats and bedsits and to add extensions on to two houses. The main issue was that the newly established green space behind St Paul’s Road would be adversely affected by the extensions, but it soon emerged that the local residents’ society objected to the development on the grounds that the company wished to move elderly residents out of their homes in the surrounding streets to small flats and bedsits concentrated in Wallace Road.43 This, they claimed, would free up the larger houses for selling off at inflated prices and hasten gentrification in the area. David Pinto of Rushclose argued that the company was only doing what Oriel Property Trust had done in the 1960s, and quoted the Milner Holland report which he said had condoned the property company’s activities because it had put resources into the estate in the early years without much in the way of return. The larger houses were in any case more suitable for families than for single elderly people, who Pinto claimed would be happier living together in the converted flats. In addition, if the larger houses had been converted into flats, the tenants might find that under the Housing Finance Act they would not be able to claim rebates since the accommodation would be considered too expensive. Pinto’s arguments were eminently rational and he won his case, but by the 1970s the mood had changed, and what had passed as reasonable development in the 1950s and 1960s was now questioned. Not only were the protestors arguing for the elderly controlled tenants to stay in their old homes, they were concerned that the Canonbury area would become completely middle class and that the developer would make an inordinately large profit. These were all arguments that had been exercised in protests against the practices of property companies in areas such as Barnsbury from the mid-1960s, and would soon be aired again in protest at the activities of property companies in Barnsbury’s Stonefield Street.44 119

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES Over the years Canonbury’s reputation has been mixed, with some hostility expressed at its success and some wonder that it had gentrified at all. An example of middle class attitudes to the new areas into which they were moving appeared in an article by columnist Benny Green in the January 1971 issue of Ideal Home.45 This was an extended piece on the Grinlings, a theatrical couple who had moved east from St John’s Wood to Canonbury. In his article, Green places Islington within that list of locations in London where the middle classes had ventured as intrepid ‘colonisers’. What is perhaps more interesting are the terms Green uses to describe Canonbury as a sort of enclave of civilisation within the dark chaos of working class London: ‘The district in which the Grinlings have chosen to live presents today a schizophrenic face to the world. On one side are the neo-Dickensian streets of a dark and neglected suburb, and on the other, no more than three minutes walk away, are the thoughtfully conceived squares and graceful spaces of Canonbury. That those elegant Georgian gestures have survived at all is in the nature of a minor miracle. What is even more heartening is that couples like the Grinlings are reclaiming old territory all the time.’46 Did a sense of guilt lie behind the need to make the striking contrast between middle class Canonbury and the surrounding streets? Balancing this curious eulogy is a more sober evaluation by Tony Wardle in the same issue of Ideal Home, which makes reference to a nearby refurbishment by the De Beauvoir Trust in Hackney: ‘Without wishing to knock either the areas or the people who live in them, places like Canonbury and Islington are in danger of winding-up with lopsided communities … Money very quickly becomes the ration book of property acquisition and once the first few brave trendsetters have moved in property prices rocket and the whole place faces a danger of turning from a working class inner suburb to something eminently desirable and decidedly middle class.’47 Wardle goes on to enumerate some of the unforeseen problems generated by gentrification, such as lack of accommodation for key workers and the destruction of communities of longstanding.

CONCLUSION What can we conclude from this history of Canonbury and its gentrification in the middle of the twentieth century? First, there were some strokes of good luck in its early history: the old tower house at its centre gave it a historic core which was never completely deserted by the middle class. Then Charles Hamor Hill’s decision to produce a ‘park estate’ on the land he leased resulted in an attractive suburban setting for houses of a suitable size and style for the mid-twentieth century middle class. That the Marquess of Northampton took the long view of Canonbury’s fortunes ensured that the area did not fall into complete decrepitude. By converting houses into self-contained flats, by selling property to Islington Council for housing, and by inviting Louis de Soissons to design new houses in bomb-damaged areas, he managed a modicum of control over the fortunes of his estate. But probably the most significant event in Canonbury’s recent history was when the Marquess sold most of it to Western Ground Rents and Oriel Property Trust. These two, through their association with insurance companies, were able to bring into the area investment with which they refurbished the houses on a rolling programme at a level not seen before. This intervention changed the nature of the local market, and introduced much more

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CHAPTER SIX TANIS HINCHCLIFFE affluent residents to the area. These soon found an identity in the old streets which they strenuously defended, even at the expense of new housing, like that proposed for the Alwynes. By the 1970s, property prices had risen to such an extent that the value of previously neglected residential property was assured. This led to the sense that, for example, the remaining Canonbury houses were ‘too good’ for pensioners, whose removal was planned by Rushclose, the successors to Oriel Property Trust. What, we might ask, would the middle classes in London have done without the apparent endless supply of nineteenth-century houses in a falling population? We are about to find out as London’s population burgeons and we run out of older, ungentrified property near the centre. Gentrification got successive governments off the hook, as there was what seemed to be an unending stream of property available for middle class consumption in London after the 1950s. The refurbishment of those properties was funded privately by mortgages – that is, middle class debt – but more recently the stream has started running dry and prices have soared. This may partly have been the result of low interest rates, as higher prices could be asked if interest payments were low. As the middle classes seek out more affordable houses, new areas in the outer suburbs and beyond become acceptable especially for young professional families, just as areas of Islington did in the 1950s and 1960s. Another option is the middle class occupation of ex-council houses, as the Right to Buy turns into the ‘right to sell.’ But cheap houses in Islington were unaffordable even for the middle classes, while building societies refused to provide mortgages for older properties, so the property companies had to kick-start their refurbishment of Canonbury by themselves offering mortgages to prospective buyers. Once the market in older houses was set in motion, the building societies changed their stance and were only too happy to finance the wave of gentrification. Today, as new global investment disrupts the balance of housing markets throughout the capital, it might be time to review how we finance the way we house ourselves. In the excitement, however, we should remember that there are at best only small profits in providing decent housing for people on low incomes, young or old – and yet all of us need a home.

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CHAPTER SEVEN HIGH-RISE HOUSING IN LONDON C.1940 TO C.1970 SIMON PEPPER1

High-rise housing comes high on many lists of post-war British mistakes, and is firmly linked in popular consciousness with those ‘sink estates’ of ‘brutal high-rise towers’ which in early 2016 yet another Prime Ministerial initiative promised to remove.2 At the same time, London in 2016 sees unprecedented numbers of high residential blocks in various stages of planning and construction.3 Although now overwhelmingly directed at the private sector, this latest high-rise construction boom not only prompts questions which historians cannot possibly answer about the future of high flats, but draws attention to the relatively recent and often troubled past of this form of housing. Not all high-rise social housing blocks, it must be said, have become sink estates. Much social malaise casually attributed to multi-storey blocks can be found in other public- and private-sector housing, and is often as much the product of poor management, policing and poverty as physical form. This said, few question the difficulties faced by families with children forced to live far from the ground. Vandalism in multi-storey blocks and their surroundings, crime, breakdowns in lifts and heating systems, and the high costs of repair and maintenance still pose problems in the management of ‘modern’ buildings now more than half a century old. Most of us prefer houses with gardens (however small) when we can get them; and Londoners made their strong views on this known in the earliest years of state-funded social housing. The early years of social housing saw widespread agreement amongst social housing professionals (meaning those engaged in housing management) that walk-up tenements were unpopular, and at best an unwelcome necessity in high density redevelopment. The highest blocks were particularly disliked.4

INTRODUCTION This chapter sets out to track the development of high-rise flats after 1945, focusing on the part played by the London County Council (LCC). Chronology is an important sub-theme. The timeline for high flat construction was (surprisingly) short; its brevity frequently camouflaged by the publication of schemes many years before their completion (and often before their start). Another sub-theme examines how high-rise housing initiatives were received and opposed. For much of our period, historically based opposition to tenements from the political left co-existed in uneasy tension with the vigorous promotion of ‘modern’ housing by the professions concerned, politicians and press (both professional and lay). Other British cities and second-tier London 123

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES boroughs all had parts to play in this complex story, but in London the LCC stands centre stage. Between 1945 and 1965 (after which it was replaced by the Greater London Council) the LCC built 116,000 of the 196,000 dwellings completed by London councils (the LCC and 27 metropolitan boroughs).5 Almost 28,000 of the County Council’s dwellings (23%) were recorded as high-rise (i.e. needing lift access), the majority in blocks no higher than six storeys.6 Flats in very high blocks of 20 storeys or more formed only 11.4% of the LCC stock by 1965, but 19.5% of those built by the GLC in the late 1960s and early 1970s.7 This last clearly emerges as the peak period for very high flat construction. An early boost to high flats followed the introduction of progressive height subsidies in the Housing Act 1956 (providing additional central Government support for each additional floor in what was already recognised as a costly form of construction). The financial incentive, when coupled with the revival of the slum-clearance programme at the same time, is widely seen as the key driver for the construction of high blocks. The wartime years and the first post-war decade should perhaps be seen as a gestation period during which ideas were shaped and pioneer projects built, but on a relatively small scale overall. The end of high social housing is easier to date. Very few high social housing blocks went into new contracts after May 1968 when a gas explosion on the eighteenth floor of a 22-storey tower block in Newham blew out a concrete panel causing a progressive collapse which killed five people and injured many others. Although contracts already signed in May 1968 often finished in the mid-1970s, the Ronan Point disaster symbolised an end to the high flat boom. The pivotal role of the LCC turned not only on its built output. The LCC Architects’ Department was much the biggest in Britain, with a staff of 1,500 in 1946–7 and just over 3,000 in 1957–8, of which 503 were qualified architects.8 Even London’s wealthier boroughs did not all have separate architects’ departments until the local government reorganisation of 1964–5 created much larger authorities. The LCC did not always get its way in dealings with other bodies, but in disputes was ‘expert heavy’.9 The LCC was also the strategic planning authority for the Administrative County, covering an area today seen as inner London (roughly Transport for London’s zones 1 and 2). It ran itself more like a Whitehall department than a local authority, recruiting its senior administrators from the same entry competition as the home civil service and jealously guarding its right to make policy, often without the level of consultation expected today. This is well illustrated by the instructions given in 1941 to the team planning the post-war reconstruction of London that there should be no contact with the metropolitan boroughs. The ban embraced elected councillors and senior officers, even including Sir Parker Morris, Westminster Town Clerk and chair of the standing joint committee of Metropolitan Boroughs, who was (as an internal LCC minute put it) ‘fobbed off’ when in August 1941 he raised the possibility of joint action over problems rising from war damage.10 Initially only limited contact was authorised with those outside the LCC who held information needed for a plan that would profoundly influence Londoners’ lives – not least in the matter of high flats.11

WARTIME LONDON PLANNING AND THE POST-WAR EMERGENCY If there was a decisive moment of change in LCC thinking on high-rise social housing, it came during these early discussions which shaped the County of London Plan (1943).12 The Forshaw– Abercrombie planning team formed in 1941 calculated the space needed for a much reduced 124

CHAPTER SEVEN SIMON PEPPER wartime population (in many heavily blitzed areas it was half of its 1939 figure) with estimates of post-war recovery. The initial priority was to prevent long-term depopulation.13 As early as November 1941 the density bands had been approved: 200 persons per acre (ppa) for central areas with practically all housing in flats; a middle 136ppa band with two-thirds of residents in flats; and an outer 100ppa band where just under half would be housed in walk-up flats generally no higher than three storeys (this outer band was later modified to allow a maximum density of 100ppa within an average of 70ppa).14 In the central 200ppa zone the flats would mostly be in blocks of seven to ten storeys. The novelty here was height. The estate densities (certainly in the middle 136ppa zone) were often less than those of pre-war inner areas. When Lewis Silkin (Chair of the LCC Planning Committee and a future Minister of Planning in Clement Attlee’s Labour government) approved the draft, he also agreed the need for amendments to the existing height zoning and an intention to promote high density development ‘in areas like Hampstead in spite of local objection.’15 The plan itself suggested that some ‘very high buildings’ would be allowed outside the central zone.16 Its illustrations showed slab blocks of flats and maisonettes up to ten storeys high. For the middle and outer zones, blocks of varying heights were envisaged in conjunction with terraced housing – the so-called ‘mixed development’ concept which would shape housing after 1945.17 This change was profound. The LCC Labour leadership had grown up with a long history of opposition to walk-up tenements, often described as ‘barracks for the working classes’. High-rise schemes had been discussed (often heatedly) before the war, but London’s pre-war ‘barracks’ generally rose no higher than five (occasionally six) storeys in walk-up blocks and even these were unacceptable in some quarters. When Labour finally gained control of the LCC in 1934, the party re-positioned itself behind an image of the modern flat. Even so, the wartime vision of a high-rise inner city found little support amongst the boroughs. This was the most criticised feature of the County Plan when London’s boroughs and others responded formally in 1943–4,18 and it was still an issue when the Plan went through a lengthy public inquiry before its adoption in 1952.19 John Forshaw, the wartime LCC Architect and co-author of the County Plan, had to fight a bitter internal battle to obtain approval for four prototype eight-storey slab blocks, to be built on the LCC’s Woodberry Down site after the war. Forshaw saw this as a trial run for mixed development. The senior administrators charged with the rapid delivery of post-war housing saw only the high costs of the eight-storey blocks and further politically embarrassing delay on one of the largest and emptiest sites already owned by the County Council. Forshaw won the argument over the experimental high blocks at Woodberry Down, but the seeds of later trouble had been planted in a senior LCC administration now convinced that innovation would impede the promised post-war housing drive. Nonetheless, one important innovation had been accepted: Lewis Silkin’s November 1941 approvals – underwritten by the majority leader Charles (later Lord) Latham and Thomas Dawson (Housing Committee Chairman) and unshaken by negative feedback – effectively committed the County Council to an eventual post-war high-rise policy and, in the short term, opened the door to borough councils to go down the same road. 1945 brought with it the (expected) LCC decision to avoid delays by placing all housing temporarily into a new directorate headed not by the architect but by the valuer, Cyril Walker. Walker was instructed to use only pre-war type plans and estate layouts; the architect’s 125

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES responsibilities were limited to town planning, schools and health buildings and a purely advisory role in housing design. Forshaw resigned to become chief architect and housing adviser at the Ministry of Health. His successor, Robert Matthew, made recovery of housing design a major personal objective, helping to orchestrate the media campaign which eventually persuaded the LCC to end what most Modernist architects regarded as a slight on their proper leadership role.20 The affair has been well reported, both for its obvious drama and – I suspect – because it ended happily, with Modernists receiving unaccustomed favourable media coverage.21 When responsibility for housing design was eventually returned to the architect in 1950, Matthew’s reconstituted department tackled the task with something close to temporary immunity from external media criticism, as well as long-term support from a Labour political leadership which had been embarrassed by the furore and now saw well reported modern social housing design (as opposed to its raw statistics) in a much more positive light.22 The first of Forshaw’s experimental eightstorey blocks opened on Woodberry Down in 1949; in what reads very much like a sweetener, its units were let as ‘luxury flats’ with lifts and central heating and higher than normal rents.23 By then, however, many other schemes showed what could be built within the post-war planning framework. With the LCC taking a self-imposed ‘time out’ on innovation, architectural interest in the late 1940s shifted to the boroughs, often making good use of underemployed private architects. Lubetkin and Tecton brought out shelved pre-war plans for high flats in Finsbury; Paddington also used Tecton to design its Hallfield estate; and Holborn employed Anthony Chitty (also formerly of Tecton) to design a ten-storey block in Dombey Street.24 Hackney commissioned Frederick Gibberd for a small ‘precinct’ in Somerford Grove where an interesting low-rise design ‘mixed’ three-storey flats, two-storey houses and bungalows for old people.25 What best captured the intentions of the County Plan for London’s central zone, however, was the open competition organised in 1945–6 by Westminster City Council (then still a second tier Metropolitan Borough) for a 33½ acre river-front site in Pimlico.26

PIMLICO Powell & Moya’s winning scheme combined an array of high-rise slabs with features of mixed development (Figure 7.1). Most of the nine-storey blocks were laid out north-to-south in classic Zeilenbau pattern, variety being introduced by a small number of three-, four- and seven-storey blocks oriented east-to-west, as well as informal open spaces and a handful of retained older buildings. Lifts and stairs served short open-air access galleries (initially with two or three units per landing). In later stages the blocks would be raised to ten and 11 storeys with longer and more cost-effective access galleries.27 Competitors had been urged to consult the County Plan for guidance and the conditions had been set by Westminster’s planning consultant, William Davidge, who enjoyed discreet access to the LCC Planning team.28 Both Davidge and the competition assessor, Stanley Ramsey, had designed well-published but ultimately unrealised high-rise schemes before the war and brought no prejudices to this task.29 What might have surprised those objecting to the high flats envisaged by the County Plan was the enthusiastic response from the public. Large numbers visited the public exhibition of the 126

CHAPTER SEVEN SIMON PEPPER competition entries in Caxton Hall (20–27 May 1946), while the press lionised the youthful architects and welcomed the appointment of John Hughes (from Manchester out of Liverpool) as Westminster City Architect: it was ‘a man-sized job’ and Hughes ‘the right man for it’.30 Readers of the Westminster & Pimlico News were told of Philip Powell’s Stakhanovite efforts, working all night in his shared flat, sustained by tea and another young architect reading him Sherlock Holmes stories.31 Critics admired the striking cylindrical heat exchanger which converted hot water from the Battersea Power Station for use in the district heating scheme. Councillor Russell (Westminster’s Chairman of Housing) focused on the new lifestyle made possible by all-flat heating: ‘instead of everyone crowding into a single [warm] room … children can do homework [in their bedrooms], the wife can retire if she wishes, leaving father in lordly loneliness in the living room with the radio’.32 Sour notes were not struck until the 1950s, when the first stages reached completion. John Summerson and Lewis Mumford admired the architectural detail but both commented presciently and critically on the implications for an urban lifestyle if such schemes were to be replicated throughout London on this scale.33

ACKROYDEN AND ROEHAMPTON

FIGURE 7.1, TOP City of Westminster, Pimlico Housing scheme, Churchill Gardens. Powell & Moya’s competition-winning design of 1946 was completed during the 1950s. Early phases rose to nine storeys: the photograph shows later ten-storey blocks. FIGURE 7.2, BOTTOM LCC housing at Alton West, Roehampton, completed during the second half of the 1950s. Aerial view of 1958 showing the cluster of 11-storey square-plan point blocks and the array of 11-storey slab blocks of maisonettes raised over piloti.

Mixed development at a much lower density had its showpiece around the fringes of Richmond Park, where just after the war the LCC acquired a number of extensive and well wooded suburban sites. Alarm bells sounded for a growing body of the valuer’s architectural and media critics when photographs of a large model showing his plans revealed regimented four-storey blocks covering much of the LCC’s biggest and most attractive site, with other spaces filled by two-storey cottages laid out on pre-war lines. Shortly after Robert Matthew’s department regained control of housing design a small-scale trial of mixed development at nearby Ackroyden combined two-storey houses with three- and four-storey flatted blocks and four of the new point blocks, three with 11 storeys (and one with nine following legal action by an owner whose property was overshadowed).34 The Ackroyden point blocks each had three flats per floor, forming a T-shaped plan. The much bigger Roehampton sites (Alton East and West) would witness further new developments as different design teams experimented 127

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES

FIGURE 7.3, ABOVE Stepney–Poplar Reconstruction Area (later Comprehensive Development Area). Map showing the major housing estates developed by the LCC and the Poplar and Stepney Borough Councils. All original buildings still in the public sector are now administered by the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. 128

with Scandinavian-influenced mixes which included improved square-plan point blocks now with four flats per floor, and a cascade of ten-storey slab blocks of maisonettes perched on Corbusian piloti in an open-field setting which a delighted Pevsner saw as picturesque English landscape (Figure 7.2).35 The first new maisonette slab blocks went into the ground at the Loughborough Estate, Lambeth, and Bentham Road, Hackney.36 Both were quickly upstaged as advertisements for the new approach to mass social housing when the main sections of Roehampton reached completion in the second half of the 1950s. However, Roehampton (density 100ppa) was certainly not typical of mixed development in inner London. For more typical schemes, and for the chronology of the different

CHAPTER SEVEN SIMON PEPPER high-rise types, it is more instructive to consider the projects which comprised the largest of the LCC’s schemes for the 136ppa density band of the County Plan.

STEPNEY AND POPLAR The most ambitious of the LCC’s inner-city undertakings was the re-shaping of almost 2,000 acres in the East End, of which 1,300 formed the Stepney–Poplar Reconstruction Area (Figure 7. 3). Extending some four miles from the City at Whitechapel to the industry along the Lea Valley, the area eventually included 12 new neighbourhoods covering large parts of Stepney and Poplar, both amongst the poorest of London’s boroughs. Sometimes lazily described as a tabula rasa cleared by bombing, Stepney in fact lost 26% of its pre-war dwellings – destroyed or seriously damaged. Poplar lost 21% of those recorded in the mid-term census of 1937.37 Although much of the surviving housing was in poor condition, the bomb damage maps show large areas untouched or subject to only minor damage. This exercise needs to be seen as a complex jigsaw of interventions involving the three local authorities, as well as a number of other bodies active in the area.38 It was very different from the parade of design manifestos which had shaped Ackroyden and Roehampton.

FIGURE 7. 4, ABOVE The LCC’s experimental eight-storey slab blocks on the Ocean Estate, Stepney, 1952–3. Like the Woodberry Down prototypes, these blocks have projecting lift/stair towers and prominent escape balconies on the upper floors. Conceived as steel frame structures with brick cladding, steel shortages forced the use of monolithic concrete.

Poplar Borough Council’s main sphere of activity was in the easternmost part of the area, that of Stepney to the west: both boroughs put their first new estates onto heavily bombed sites. Between these peripheral zones, the LCC planned what they called a ‘New Town in an Old City’ to run in a broad crescent from the Clive Street and Ocean Street areas in Stepney south of the Mile End Road, south again to the Mountmorres Road area, then east over the Regent’s Canal, through St Anne’s and over the Limehouse Cut to Lansbury in Poplar, and north again to the Alton Street, St Paul’s Way and Devons Road sites. Planning had begun for Ocean Street, St Paul’s Way and Devons Road shortly after the publication of the County Plan in 1943.39 By July 1944 alternative layouts had been costed using both pre-war block plans and layouts and what were described as ‘London Plan’ principles (an early version of mixed development as illustrated in the County of London Plan)40 – although when the schemes were formally approved in February 1945, only at Ocean Street was this new approach to layout authorised.41 However, all three schemes were eventually cleared to use the modernised flat plans which had – despite the prohibition on new types – been 129

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approved at the end of the war, just before the valuer took over. Three of the experimental eight-storey blocks would also be built at Ocean Street in the early 1950s when the LCC invitation to tenderers to price for steel frame or for concrete construction was foiled by yet another steel shortage caused by rearmament for the Korean War (Figure 7.4).42 At Lansbury, however, new designs were actively encouraged for the ‘Live Architecture’ exhibit, the LCC contribution to the Festival of Britain. The layout had been handled by the Planning Division of the Architects’ Department and formally credited to Robert Matthew’s chief planner, Arthur Ling. Selected private architects were commissioned to design different sections in two-, three- or four-storey blocks with a small number of six-storey blocks contributed by the valuer’s team.43 To some it was all ‘too timid’.44 Percy Johnson-Marshall, who worked under Arthur Ling to head the entire Stepney–Poplar project, would later complain that Lansbury ‘was prepared under difficult conditions: for instance the LCC Housing Committee would agree to no flats being over six storeys in height’.45

FIGURE 7.5, ABOVE LCC St Anne’s neighbourhood, Stepney (later Locksley Estate) showing eight-storey slabs (built) and a planned 15-storey point block. 130

The ‘experimental’ eight storey concrete slab blocks at Ocean Street were completed in 1953 together with Stepney Borough Council’s Ansell House, on Mile End Road, an eight-storey slab block with six-storey wings seen by Pevsner as a ‘grand showpiece … quite stylish in a Dudokian way’.46 For some years these blocks were almost the tallest social housing in the reconstruction area (although Currie House in Poplar, discussed below, rose to nine storeys). To the west of Lansbury the St Anne’s neighbourhood included the two eight-storey slab blocks occupied in October 1956 (Figure 7.5).47 However, in 1955 the LCC had announced that the northern

CHAPTER SEVEN SIMON PEPPER extension of Lansbury would compensate for the shortfall in density of the exhibition site with a group of six 11-storey point blocks, prompting the first expressions of concern from Poplar Borough Council (Figure 7.6).48 A year later, in a lecture to the Housing Centre, the LCC Principal Housing Architect HJ Whitfield Lewis described even higher schemes: a 15-storey point block was now planned for the St Anne’s site and three 17-storey maisonette blocks for the Clive Street site (both in Stepney – Figure 7. 7) as well as a 19-storey maisonette block for Tidey Street (Poplar) and a group of six 18-storey point blocks at the Brandon estate near Kennington (Southwark).49 The ten-storey block on the Lindfield Estate in Lansbury (Anglesea House, 1959–61), and the 11-storey block of maisonettes on the Birchfield Estate (Thornfield House, 1960–62) were the only high slab blocks to be built by the LCC in the Stepney and Poplar Reconstruction Area until the late 1960s when the Smithsons’ design for Robin Hood Gardens explored street decks (streets in the sky instead of access galleries) in a scheme which included a ten-storey block, by then not considered particularly high.50 From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, the LCC increasingly focused on point blocks, in line with the policy for high buildings adopted by its Town Planning Committee in 1956, which for the first time explicitly favoured point blocks over slabs.51 However, when Whitfield Lewis lectured on his ambitions in November 1956 none of these very high schemes had been built, and some would not be completed until the mid-1960s. Public concern was still muted – and professional and media opinion still excited – by images of the Pimlico riverfront and Roehampton, and by what the press then called Skyscraper Housing.

SKYSCRAPER HOUSING

FIGURE 7.6, ABOVE, TOP LCC Alton Street development, North Lansbury. The six point blocks (with two more in neighbouring Barchester Street) made the largest group of late1950s high-rises in the Stepney–Poplar Reconstruction Area. FIGURE 7. 7, ABOVE, BOTTOM Montage on an aerial photograph showing the three 17-storey point blocks of the LCC Stifford Estate (demolished 1999–2000) and Latham Tower, which still forms the centrepiece of the LCC Mountmorres Road Estate.

High Paddington was presented in 1952 as a ‘New Town for 8,000 people’ over the 20-acre goods yards outside Paddington Station (Figure 7.8).52 Rising over 30 storeys (340 ft) it would have dwarfed the capital’s tallest building (the University’s Senate House library tower). The exceptionally high density, it was argued, not only provided a new skyscraper neighbourhood and open space, but also allowed for a strategic reserve of short-term accommodation for those displaced by future slum clearance. Over the railway tracks, a podium 100 ft deep contained warehousing, car parking, shops and a department store – an early shopping mall. Over the mall an 131

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES open pedestrian plaza had sites for a school and health clinic. Features of the Y-plan residential blocks and hotel were clearly modelled on Corbusier’s recently completed Marseilles Unité block. Lift stops every three floors served central corridors. The maisonettes had double-height living rooms and enclosed balconies front and back handled as winter-gardens, ‘sufficiently large to form extra rooms’, the Picture Post enthused, and giving protection from the severe weather expected at high altitude.53 High Paddington was the brainchild of Serge Kadleigh, a pre-war CIAM member now teaching at the Royal College of Art, assisted by Patrick Horsbrugh, a recent AA graduate. They were encouraged by Paddington’s architect and town planning officer, Rolf Jensen, who was promoting very tall high-rise and densities up to 300ppa. Support also came from the newly elected MP for Paddington South, Robert Allan, an influential City figure and a rising star of the Conservative Party.54 Allan chaired the steering committee and engaged a group of major figures in the construction industry to report on viability.55 Here, in embryo, was the sort of alliance that would in a few years time ‘sell’ system-built industrialised housing.

FIGURE 7. 8, ABOVE High Paddington by Kadleigh and Horsbrugh; model exhibited 1952 and published by Architect and Building News (23 October 1952) and other journals. This image was used in advertisements by Cubitts, one of the project consultants. 132

It is difficult to disagree with Patrick Dunleavy’s assessment of the project itself as ‘rather fantastic’.56 Yet its contemporary reception varied widely. Sir William Holford reviewed it critically on BBC radio and the Town Planning Review dealt with it harshly in an editorial.57 Particularly strong support came from The Architect and Building News, which was so taken with the proposal that the journal became almost a co-promoter. Although it was not a thing of beauty, Pevsner sprang to its defence against style critics.58 Nor was it dismissed as fantasy by officialdom: Forshaw’s staff in the ministry as well as the LCC engineer and architect studied it carefully, all following requests from the Minister for Housing Harold Macmillan’s junior minister, Ernest Marples MP, while Hadleigh and Horsbrugh were interviewed in a joint session of the LCC’s housing and planning committees.59 Kadleigh was later awarded the 1953 Silver Medal of the Royal Society of Arts for his lecture ‘A “Hill Town” over the railway’.60 The Institute of Civil Engineers convened a special conference at which Professor AW Skempton of Imperial College expounded on foundations for tall buildings.61 All this aside, practical outcomes were limited. Paddington’s plans to build a prototype in the form of three Y-shaped blocks of 15-storey flats on a site at Perkins Green

CHAPTER SEVEN SIMON PEPPER were rejected by the LCC, prompting Jensen’s departure for academia in Australia. Shifting tack, Kadleigh and Horsbrugh then found a new design partner in the architect William Whitfield, and another collaborator in Bryan Anstey, a City surveyor, before persuading Sir Gerald Barry (former editor and Festival of Britain chief executive) to chair their New Barbican Committee and gingerup the City Corporation in its painfully slow reconstruction of the 47 acres between Aldersgate and Moorfields. Their promotion campaign included a film screened in the House of Commons where a spectacular model (complete with internal lighting) was exhibited.62 Once again their rival scheme was not implemented, but Percy Johnson-Marshall would later acknowledge that their ideas had contributed to the Barbican’s eventual redevelopment.63

THE VERTICAL LIVING DEBATE The High Paddington plans generated a series of seminars sponsored by the Architects’ Journal in late 1952, collected and published in 1953 as The Vertical Living Debate.64 Reading it today, one contribution stands out: Alex Bellamy, representing the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, argued that it was difficult to justify the building of many high blocks inside or outside London’s central areas and (in common with other contributors) urged that families with small children not be housed in them. The most cost-effective way to maximise houses at 136ppa, in Bellamy’s view, was to combine two- or three-storey terraces with eight- or ten-storey flats – but here he pointed to a current anomaly which excluded such houses (i.e. not flats) from the expensive site subsidy. Bellamy wanted to reverse a situation whereby the LCC built very few houses inside the county and large numbers outside. Mixed suburban developments of flats and houses – with a modest increase in density – would do more to resolve shortages of housing and farm land than excessive densities and costly high buildings at the centre. Bellamy had been a member of the County of London planning team in 1941–3 (one of those starred in the contributors list for their original research). Later, while still employed by the LCC, he established the basic framework for the Lansbury exhibition site.65 Following Forshaw to the ministry, he specialised in housing as an architect and, after transfer to the administrative stream, ended his career as an Under Secretary heading London’s Housing Division. During the mid1950s he spent a year researching high-rise housing in the USA on a Commonwealth Fund scholarship, investigating why America so consistently undercut the obstinately high costs of tall flats in Britain. Bellamy’s report found that while British architects favoured ever-higher point blocks, the Americans built ‘thick’, with many more apartments per floor and per elevator (even when generous banks of lifts were installed) as well as with central heating and hot water. To European eyes, the American social housing blocks looked bulky and often overwhelmed visitors. To be sure, ministry advice and LCC internal research were both leading towards more flats per floor, but on a minimal scale, such as the move from three to four flats per lift lobby at Roehampton. Bellamy returned from the States convinced that social housing designers needed to address increasing car ownership, advocating the use of narrow-fronted three-storey townhouses with garages which – appealing now to a Conservative government – would allow the private sector to contribute meaningfully to renewal. At a time when Britain was re-launching its slum clearance drive, Bellamy had also looked at American rehabilitation of old housing, opening the door both to private sector investment and the reuse of old but sound housing. These views found their way into a handful of articles.66 What is perhaps more important is that by 133

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES the late 1950s, senior staff of the Ministry of Housing and Local Government were aware of a range of issues that a decade later would radically undermine many mainstream British urban housing policies.67

OPPOSITION The Vertical Living Debate did not fundamentally challenge flats. For this one turns to activists such as Father John Groser, whose evidence to the London Development plan inquiry in 1952 impressed the young Guardian journalist and future Labour MP Lena Jeger.68 Father Groser spoke for the Stepney Reconstruction Group at Toynbee Hall, arguing that Stepney needed houses with small gardens, not flats, and that what should be dispersed was industry, not a population already reduced to half its pre-war number. He maintained that extended families (immigrants as well as established networks) needed houses because life was lived in and out of their front doors and in the street. The case for industrial relocation was deployed with impressive statistical underpinning by Denys Munby, an Oxford economist who had worked in Stepney during the war with volunteers from the Stepney Group. He too argued for houses rather than flats.69 Another challenge came from Michael Young and Peter Willmott whose Family and Kinship in East London was published in 1957. The book was not about housing per se, but it challenged dispersal and clearances for open space, proposing house improvements wherever possible and flatted factories rather than high-rise flats.70 Responding to a sympathetic leading article in The Times – almost a book review – they spelled out their physical proposals.71 Houses – newly built or reconditioned – should come first, flats second. Architects should put to one side ‘suburban standards’ and apply their ingenuity to designing terrace houses with small gardens at high densities: ‘The major error surely is to imagine that the metropolis can or should be made in the image of Welwyn, Harlow, or Stevenage. This is not what most Londoners want – not if the price is to continue the mass migration and to force the majority of those who remain to live in flats.’72 Interviewed in 1994 Lord Young asked: ‘Why didn’t the Bethnal Green councillors, who came from those very streets and shared the attitude of their constituents, resist the bulldozing and break-up of those communities?’ Answering his own question: ‘They [the councillors] were hoodwinked and out-talked by the clever architects and town planners … They gave way … and they gave way all over the country … to what was thought to be the modern fashion – the architectural and planning ideologies.’73 The councillors of neighbouring Poplar did resist. Poplar of course ‘had form’ for opposition both to central Government and the LCC; famously, 30 borough councillors led by George Lansbury went to jail in 1921 for their refusal to set a rate. In 1944 and again in 1950 Poplar expressed strong reservations on the proportion of flats proposed for the 200ppa and 136ppa density bands of the County Plan. Nevertheless, the borough experimented cautiously with high flats in the early 1950s, employing a firm of private architects, Farquharson and McMorran.74 Their highest building was the gently curved nine-storey Currie House started in July 1952 on a prominent site facing the Canning Town bridge.75 The Borough Engineer also experimented with ‘high density houses’ in Alpha Grove (three-storey narrow fronted terraces for large families).76 Most of Poplar’s early post-war housing, however, was in three- and (at most) four-storey walk-up flats. Currie 134

CHAPTER SEVEN SIMON PEPPER House was opened in November 1953. In January 1954 Poplar Councillor P Connolly was forced publicly to deny a ‘pernicious rumour’ that the high flats were proving difficult to let.77 Two years later the borough council itself had become firmly convinced that indeed high flats did not work for Poplar and a delegation led by Alderman TJ Beningfield met with Richard Edmonds (Chairman of the LCC Town Planning Committee) and senior staff to discuss the problem. The January 1956 meeting was prompted by LCC plans for six 11-storey point blocks on the Alton Street site, part of the Lansbury northern extension (Figure 7.6). Beningfield’s party wished to report numerous transfer requests from tenants in Poplar’s high flats and to pass on a warning about local antipathy to this form of housing. Whitfield Lewis told the meeting that the Alton Street scheme was a development of Barchester Street, which had already been approved (practically a clinching argument in LCC terms), that 60% of the development was in low buildings (four-storey maisonette blocks) and that tenants on the top floors were mainly in two- or three-room flats. ‘It was not possible,’ he asserted, ‘to have a satisfactory development at 136 persons per acre in four storeys.’ Gordon Logie (Senior Planner) stressed the value of ‘opening up’ the layout with high blocks. Beningfield repeated his ‘warning’ but stated that they did not intend to take the matter of Alton Street further. Asked if point blocks would be built on a site adjoining Victoria Park, Logie ‘thought that this was probably in mind and the Borough Council would be kept informed’.78 Poplar followed up this meeting with a letter complaining that the borough had been consulted far too late to change anything and asked about future plans for nearby Tidey and Tetley Streets.79 To this the clerk to the LCC replied dismissively that the Council’s officers could not consult the Borough Council until proposals had been approved by the Council’s own committees. A manuscript note was added: ‘Note for Ch[airman] – one of these sites (Tidey Street) is earmarked for a 19-storey block’.80 In September 1956, with the 19-storey block at Tidey Street having been approved by the LCC without any prior discussion, another borough delegation – now thoroughly irritated – confronted LCC Housing Chairman Bill Fiske (Figure 7.9). The LCC team stated disingenuously that they thought Poplar had agreed to the Alton Street 11-storey point blocks. Poplar maintained that they had been faced with a fait accompli. Fiske now suggested informal arbitration on Tidey Street by ministry officials (the same people who would advise the minister after a public inquiry).81 The LCC was evidently anxious to avoid a formal objection and a public inquiry which – if it went the ‘wrong way’ – would threaten a strategy which increasingly employed high blocks to permit openness in layout (i.e. amenity open space) and to increase the proportion of family houses which had always formed part – albeit only a small part – of mixed development. At the RIBA symposium on high-flats in February 1955, the LCC had been criticised by John Forshaw (acting as rapporteur) for the very small proportion of houses in the schemes described by Whitfield Lewis in his presentation: ‘4 per cent, 8 per cent and 10 per cent at the most. London should do better’.82 The LCC response to criticism of this kind was to go for taller blocks delivering spot densities sufficiently high to allow a few more houses and many more four-storey maisonette blocks (the lower dwellings with their gardens now claimed as ‘houses’). With the town planners opposed to higher or longer slab blocks (for their bulk and overshadowing), the housing design teams now developed much taller blocks of narrow-fronted maisonettes with short internal access corridors (exterior galleries being unviable at high altitude) and lift stops every other floor. The three 17-storey blocks for Clive Street (the future Stifford Estate) pioneered this compromise 135

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES (Figure 7.7). The 19-storey block at Tidey Street – described as a point block – was the latest example and incorporated ‘crossover’ maisonettes (allowing all the living rooms to be planned on the south side, away from the gas works).83 Bill Fiske’s offer of informal arbitration was eventually scotched when the ministry decided that it would be best to settle matters firmly in a dispute which threatened wider repercussions. The scheme was ‘called in’ and the machinery set in motion for a public hearing before a ministry inspector.84 The inquiry held on 27 November 1956 added little. The chief witness for the LCC was Percy Johnson-Marshall, who restated Whitfield Lewis’s earlier assertions about the necessity for a tall building to achieve the zoned density. The alternative was two six-storey blocks and one of 11 storeys. The scheme as drawn would provide a variety of dwelling types, variety in appearance, and open space – the classic mixed development formula plus ‘magnificent views across the docks to the hills of distant Kent’.85 Poplar maintained that the tower block was too high, the open space over generous, and the tenants of their own high flats already seeking transfers. Interviewed outside County Hall, WTG Guy, Poplar’s Council Leader, derided the notion that his people would be excited by dockland views (‘most of them work there all day’) and described the high block as ‘a monstrosity’. Alderman WI Brinson declared ‘Flat life in our borough is killing us’.86 The Minister’s decision came a few weeks later upholding the scheme as ‘satisfactory architecturally’ providing ‘a good variety of dwellings and a satisfactory layout’.87 At this point the lay press was still ambivalent on high-rise: Tidey Street had been announced breathlessly by the News Chronicle as ‘the highest residential building yet designed for an LCC housing estate’,88 while the East London Advertiser headlined the minister’s decision: ‘Poplar will have its 19-storey Skyscraper!’ It was unclear whether this was seen as a good or bad thing.89

BOOM AND BUST

FIGURE 7. 9, ABOVE LCC Tidey Street scheme (later Lincoln Estate). Rendering of Sleaford House, the 19-storey LCC maisonette block which was the focus of the 1956–7 dispute with Poplar Borough Council. 136

With the Tidey Street decision in their favour, the LCC did not seem over-anxious to press ahead.90 The 19-storey blocks for the Tidey Street and nearby Spanby Street sites (which together would form the Lincoln Estate) were completed just before the LCC itself went out of existence in 1965. By then the high-rise construction boom was at its height. The GLC (still controlled by Labour until 1967) would mark out the boundaries of the

CHAPTER SEVEN SIMON PEPPER Stepney–Poplar reconstruction area with very high blocks. 1965 saw approval for a 26-storey maisonette block in Rowlett Street (Ernő Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower, completed early in 1968 when the architect famously moved into a unit on the top floors – see Chapter Eight). 1966–8 saw approvals for a 20-storey block (Fitzgerald House) on the Lansbury Exhibition site, a 23-storey and a 25-storey block at Swedenborg Square, a group of three 25-storey blocks off Campbell Road (the Crossways scheme just north of Tidey Street), and two 24-storey blocks at Watney Street. The approval in 1968 of a 28-storey block for the Swedenborg Square site (Shearsmith Tower on today’s St George’s Estate) was the last high GLC block in the Stepney–Poplar area and amongst the last of the new approvals for high blocks just before the disaster at Ronan Point (Figure 7.10).

FIGURE 7.10 LCC Swedenborg Gardens (later St George’s Estate), Stepney. Cluster of three towers including the 28-storey Shearsmith Tower, the highest LCC block in the Stepney–Poplar area.

Like Poplar, West Ham was a Labour stronghold and had started its post-war house-building with low-rise cottage estates and four-storey blocks of flats.91 Unlike Poplar – and despite strong evidence of their tenants’ preference for houses – the borough drifted into a high-flat building policy that by the 1960s was delivering 70% of its new units in tower blocks. Some of them (including the two 25-storey towers of the award-winning Barnwood estate completed in 1966 by Stillman and EastwickField) consisted entirely of one- and three-bedroom flats, thus ensuring an excessively high child density. Tenant unrest at Barnwood was featured in an April 1968 BBC TV Man Alive programme, just a month before the Ronan Point disaster. The post-1965 London Borough of Newham had inherited from West Ham a number of commitments to national and international system-building companies. Ronan Point was one part of a large contract for 22-storey pre-cast concrete heavy panel system-built blocks by Taylor Woodrow-Anglian under licence from the Danish firm, Larsen-Nielsen. After a panel was blown out by a kitchen gas explosion on the eighteenth floor, one corner of the tower had progressively collapsed. The subsequent inquiry was highly critical of a dangerously casual approach to construction standards and structural safety and an all too willing acceptance of inadequately researched systems.92 Local authorities all over the country now embarked upon rapid risk assessments, and large sums were spent on strengthening.93 The media finally woke-up to a miasma of problems associated not only with industrialised system-built flats per se, but with the kind of housing environment generated 137

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES by them and the many issues rising from the extensive slum clearances that so often accompanied them.94

AFTERMATH The GLC itself emerged relatively unscathed from the post-Ronan Point crisis. The Larsen-Nielsen system had of course first been used in Britain by the LCC at Morris Walk, Woolwich (see cover) and both the LCC and GLC had employed many other industrialised systems. At Morris Walk, the LCC design team was over 100 strong, which did not of course prevent cost overruns.95 However, everything was closely monitored and (unlike at Newham and some other authorities) there had been no question of committing the whole project, still less the entire house-building programme, to the all-in services of system-builders. What was surprising was the number of the newly formed outer London boroughs found to have approved very big high flat contracts, such as Brent (11 blocks of 16–22 storeys in 1965–72), Enfield (12 blocks of 22–23 storeys in 1965–7) and Waltham Forest (13 blocks 21–22 storeys high in 1965–72).96 Yet already other London boroughs were moving in entirely different directions. The City of Westminster’s Pimlico housing competition had served as a major launch pad for post-1945 high-rise, and by 1959 Westminster was building point blocks twice as high at Kemp House (18 storeys in Soho) and Hide Tower (21 storeys in Millbank, and briefly London’s highest block).97 After this the city built very few high flats.98 In 1964 Westminster embarked on the construction of a scheme for Lillington Street which had been won in 1961 in another competition by John Darbourne (later in partnership as Darbourne & Darke), and which is now seen as a pioneer of low- (or lower-) rise high-density design.99 From 1965 the recently formed borough of Camden, steered by its Borough Architect, Sydney Cook, launched another creative search for low-rise alternatives to high flats.100 Some years would pass before the demolition of difficult-to-let high-rise blocks in front of cheering crowds and TV cameras became a popular weekend event. However, in the Stepney– Poplar area a number of the high blocks have come down. First to be demolished were the three experimental eight-storey blocks on the Ocean Estate, now replaced by low-rise terraces. The three 17-storey blocks of the Stifford Estate were dismantled in 1999–2000, and again replaced by low-rise housing. The Stifford Estate had been an LCC showpiece, overlooking the extended Stepney Green with its Henry Moore sculpture, and visited by the Queen in 1962 shortly after the first tenants had moved in.101 Currie House (Poplar’s first excursion into high-rise) came down in 2010; its site is now occupied by an early phase of the Aberfeldy Village development. As late as 1965, Percy Johnson-Marshall (by then a professor in Sir Robert Matthew’s department at the University of Edinburgh) still expected the 15-storey tower block shown in the 1955 model of the St Anne’s neighbourhood to serve as a visual focus and ‘help to open up the Regent’s Canal at this point’.102 It was never built. The Regent’s Canal and the nearby Limehouse Cut are now lined (in some places almost continuously) with new private sector flats, often in gated enclosures. In high-demand locations on the approaches to the City and Canary Wharf, post-war social housing has already changed hands or been replaced by private sector developments (often, but not always, containing a small proportion of affordable homes). Much of this new private sector housing is between six and 12 storeys high. Some rises much higher. High-rise housing is back in this part of London, but now almost exclusively for the private sector.103 The ‘New Town in an Old City’ is changing again, with all the social upheaval that accompanies such transformations. 138

CHAPTER SEVEN SIMON PEPPER I suggested at the beginning of this essay that the Ronan Point disaster ‘symbolised’ the end of high-rise social housing construction. However, it would be quite wrong to suppose that it caused it. Much more significant was the decision of the second Wilson Labour government (highly supportive of the building of housing but compelled to cut public expenditure amidst a series of sterling crises culminating in devaluation) to end the additional floors subsidy and impose a new system of tighter controls, the Housing Cost Yardstick. Local authorities received more than two years’ warning of these changes because many of the key features of the Housing Subsidies Act (1967) mirrored those of the Housing Subsidies Bill (1965) which had been introduced by the first Wilson government but failed to complete its parliamentary passage before the General Election in March 1966. Lionel Esher may not therefore have exaggerated very much when he wrote that by 1965 ‘the tower blocks had vanished from the drawing boards at County Hall’.104 Another important change was signalled by the housing White Paper of April 1968 which proposed ‘a shift in the emphasis of the housing effort’ with a greater share of public investment going to the improvement of old houses.105 Nor should it be forgotten here that in the late 1960s, figures for UK house-building completions broke briefly through the 400,000 a year barrier. Although well short of the 500,000 new houses a year promised in the 1966 Labour manifesto, it was a figure that would delight any twenty-first century government.106 The 1970s would see further economic crises, galloping inflation, and the start of a long-term decline in public sector housebuilding together with the virtual ending of slum clearance (replaced by grant-aided improvements and area renewal). Richard Crossman, Housing Minister in Harold Wilson’s first government of 1964–6, would reveal in his diaries how these different trains of policy coincided in the mind of an observant politician when in 1965 he visited Salford to inspect examples of modest improvements to pre-1914 terraces, which typically saw basic repairs, indoor water closets, new bathrooms and modern kitchen equipment. ‘In Salford I found that for £200 they were making people happy. Since I don’t like the idea of people having to live in huge blocks of high-rise housing, I found the Salford efforts extremely attractive.’107

139

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CHAPTER EIGHT ‘WE FELT MAGNIFICENT BEING UP THERE’ – ERNŐ GOLDFINGER’S BALFRON TOWER AND THE CAMPAIGN TO KEEP IT PUBLIC DAVID ROBERTS In December 2015, the London Borough of Tower Hamlets approved plans to refurbish and privatise Balfron Tower, a high-rise of 146 flats and maisonettes arranged on 26 storeys built in 1965–7, the first phase of émigré architect Ernő Goldfinger’s work on the Greater London Council’s (GLC) Brownfield Estate in Poplar, east London (Figure 8.1). In this chapter, I describe my collaborative work with the tower’s current and former residents in the preceding three years, during which we campaigned for Balfron to remain a beacon for social housing. I structure the chapter on the three phases this work followed: an analysis of cultural, academic and archival material, which foregrounds both the persistent accusations of failure that have afflicted the tower and the egalitarian principles integral to its vision and function as social housing; engagement with residents, re-enacting Goldfinger’s own methods of gathering empirical evidence in 1968; and activism drawing on this material and evidence to contribute to a more informed public debate and planning decisions. Through this chapter, I illustrate how Balfron’s history was mobilised to commodify the tower on the one hand, and to interrogate and object to this process on the other. In doing so, I advance an argument that the practice and guidance of heritage of post-war housing estates must not only pay tribute to the egalitarian principles at their foundations, it must enact them.

‘OUT OF TOUCH?’: ANALYSIS OF CULTURAL, ACADEMIC AND ARCHIVAL MATERIAL Throughout the shifting course of opinion, both popular and expert, certain judgments of Balfron Tower have been accepted uncritically – correlating its architecture of dramatic proportions with a way of life as stark and severe, ill-suited to the needs of families, and at a high density in which socialisation is difficult – prompting one politician to declare it ‘the benchmark of post-war architectural failure’ and a regeneration manager to recommend ‘this and all its ilk should be demolished and consigned to the bin marked “failed experiment’’ ‘.1 In a paper to the Courtauld Institute 20 years ago, historian Adrian Forty reflected on some of the reasons why the architecture of the post-war period absorbs our interest, and some of the things that stand in the way of our understanding.2 He noted the first, and most awkward, fact faced by the historian is that it is widely considered a failure. This label of failure, he observed, is reserved 141

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES

FIGURE 8.1, ABOVE Balfron Tower, 1971. 142

CHAPTER EIGHT DAVID ROBERTS almost exclusively for works built by the state, and, most commonly, in reference to social housing schemes. Forty suggested the mistake historians have made is to look in the wrong place for the causes of failure. With very detailed historical attention they have vindicated the architects or buildings themselves by stressing their aesthetic qualities and honourable intentions, though, in doing so, they often overlook social issues or propose causal explanations for their failure on technical or cultural grounds. Instead, Forty offered, it would be better to ‘examine the minds of those who judge these works’.3 We should not, he said, be troubled by whether or not they actually were a failure but that they have been perceived to be.4 I wish to take on Forty’s thorny epistemological and methodological challenge of perception in relation to Balfron Tower. I speculate that most people have not taken the opportunity to visit and gain direct experience of the tower, so how else might they have arrived at the damning conclusion of failure? To answer this, I briefly consider the body of cultural material that broadcasts a certain perception of the tower to the public. The most famous representations of Balfron Tower are in feature films which go beyond the typical kitchen sink dramas set in housing estates to fictive dystopian wastelands. In Danny Boyle’s harrowing sci-fi horror 28 Days Later, a virus has spread to humans turning them into ‘the infected’, frothing zombies that scale the tower in vicious bands.5 In Elliott Lester’s crime thriller Blitz, Balfron stars as the home of a strutting psychotic serial killer who murders members of the police force.6 Paul Anderson’s Shopping is set in the tower block and follows its gang of feral teenage residents who indulge in joyriding and ram-raiding.7 These films, and countless others, use Balfron as a backdrop for invariably frightening incidents in which the tower appears from acute angles, its warm aggregate stained under filters. They exploit Balfron’s height and style as inherently unsafe and violent, and embellish its neglect, both material and social, by dressing the tower in graffiti and abandoned cars. This is reinforced in the accompanying dialogue: ‘Look at this place, how do people live in this filth? ... This whole estate’s a disgrace.’8 Ben Campkin has characterised this powerful imaginary of decline that has encircled post-war estates and distorted our understanding, ‘taking them into a representational realm of abstract generalisation’.9 Campkin explores this characterisation further here in Chapter Nine. This is a reading echoed in newspaper reports. In 2014–15, The Mirror described the building as ‘attracting muggers, drug gangs and junkies and rumoured to once be the local council’s go-to solution for problem tenants’;10 Time Out portrayed ‘junkies in the stairwells, domestic violence, drug deals and constant low-level crime’;11 and the Daily Mail summarised Balfron as ‘known for violence, crime and poverty’.12 This is taken even further by the Sunday Times, which identified it as ‘the ugliest building in London’, by LBC radio as the ‘worst eyesore in London’, and upgraded still by The Mirror and Evening Standard who anointed it ‘Britain’s ugliest building’.13 We must question where the evidence for these claims lies. One possible explanation is simply the style it has come to symbolise – its categorisation as a ‘leading example of so-called Brutalist architecture’.14 In 2000, Simon Jenkins in The Times wrote: ‘The 24-storey Balfron Tower by the brutalist architect Ernő Goldfinger … gives Poplar a final mugging. Its footings are a no-go area for humanity. Trash, chicken-wire and graffiti abound. The tower is without charm or visual diversion. It makes Wormwood Scrubs seem like the Petit Trianon. Poverty is not Poplar’s curse. The curse is architecture.’15 143

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES The term ‘Brutalism’ was coined by architects Alison and Peter Smithson and theorised by critic Reyner Banham after the French word ‘brut’, referring to the uncompromising use of raw concrete that figured boldly in abstract geometries of late Modernist buildings.16 Goldfinger’s use of bush-hammered concrete and the dramatic style of his designs mean that they are often categorised as Brutalist yet, like many of his contemporaries, he never used, and actively disliked the term. In cultural and media representations like Jenkins’, Brutalism is most commonly used as an intentional conflation of an architectural style and the brutal behaviour that takes place within it. Ike Ijeh in Building wrote: ‘The sixties tower block is also a building type now widely despised and perhaps the only reliable way to deepen the antipathy in which it is generally held is to garnish it with the toxic epithets “concrete” and “brutalist”. Heroically, Balfron House ticks all said boxes … many of [its] features embody the widely discredited ideologies that continue to stigmatise sixties public housing to this day including inhuman character, pugnacious form, multiple raised deck access and appalling thermal performance.’17 Alongside the aesthetic condemnation, Ijeh’s insinuation of structural failings is repeated by many other commentators; The Mirror describes it as ‘decayed’, The Evening Standard as ‘asbestosridden’ and The Guardian as ‘decaying’ and a ‘crumbling obelisk’.18 These representations amass to create an image of violent intent and material decay, both physical and, by inference, social. Finally, the Architects’ Journal describes the tower as ‘an impenetrable fortress’ in which flats are ‘clad with penitentiary steel bars’, 19 and The Mirror depicts Balfron as ‘the kind of place where people rush past with their heads bowed, terrified of making eye contact with their unknown neighbours’. As performance theorists Charlotte Bell and Katie Beswick have noted elsewhere, it makes us, as viewers, speculate in the popular belief that there is ‘a correlative relationship between the council estate environment and “pathological” behaviour of estate residents’ – in this case an architectural determinism so extreme that a brutal building might even breed brutal murderers.20 These images of Balfron Tower have a much less firm place in popular culture than those of its creator. By accident of a bizarre set of circumstances that brought his exotic name to the attention of James Bond author Ian Fleming, Goldfinger is fated to exist as much in fiction as in flesh and blood.21 Indeed, almost every article repeats the trite contention that he provided the inspiration for Fleming’s villain. As the Architects’ Journal has noted, ‘a large part of Goldfinger’s iconic status rests on his name itself, with all its bizarrely descriptive resonance and its filmic associations with evil desires for world dominance’.22 The other part of Goldfinger’s iconic status rests on his forceful personality – a lifelong Marxist with an unmistakable Hungarian accent and famously explosive temperament. When combined, it seems difficult for those depicting the tower to avoid what Michael Freeden has labelled the ‘individualistic fallacy’ which ‘overstresses the function of a particular individual as the creator of a system’.23 In this, it is commonplace for the trope of hero or villain to shape and dominate the discussion. Those inclined to read the story of Balfron Tower as a morality play of tyrannical hubris exaggerate both the intentions of Goldfinger’s architecture and its lived actualities without evidence. The most common conception assumes Goldfinger’s aim was to deliver utopia for its residents – an aim so unachievably high that anything less than the perfect society means failure. In this narrative arc, following the fall from utopia to dystopia, Goldfinger the hero is transformed into Goldfinger the villain. This gives rise to pathetic fallacy in 144

CHAPTER EIGHT DAVID ROBERTS which the architect is his building; Goldfinger, the supercilious or well-intentioned social engineer comes to look like his creation – a terrifying, flawed, tower of a man. As I discovered further such representations, I came to realise how easy it is to be seduced by this dominating story; to conflate, without any available evidence to the contrary, these perceived experiences for lived ones and assume tenants have been clamouring to escape. Having dwelt in the speculative and the fictional, I too wish to escape, leaving behind the sofa strewn with popcorn kernels to enter the civilised academic spaces of the library and archive. Looking across the literature I gather on the tower, I identify a recent proliferation of accounts with a resurgence of interest in Balfron’s quality, ideals, and social history. The first trend is a renewed appreciation by historians and critics of the quality and originality of the tower. Andrew Higgott describes a new climate in which ‘once disdained modern buildings such as the housing tower blocks by Goldfinger are now valued, not as curiosities, but as good architecture’.24 Kenneth Powell declares, ‘Aesthetically, London’s best high modern buildings are the two strange housing towers by that tough-minded disciple of Auguste Perret, the late Ernő Goldfinger’.25 Andrew Saint and Elain Harwood cheer these ‘extraordinary’ towers as ‘isolated statements of French monumentalism and concrete technique in the unexpected settings of North Kensington and Poplar’.26 Bridget Cherry recognises ‘superior quality is at once apparent’ when approaching Balfron: ‘The 26-storey block is immediately arresting, with its slender semi-detached tower containing lift, services, and chunky oversailing boiler house’.27 Alan Powers’ lecture to the Royal Academy offered his audience an experiential account of the tower, in which he describes Balfron’s architecture as neither alien nor imposed but well suited to its post-industrial landscape; it ‘is a wonderful landmark, you really know where you are in East London when you see this, it does matter’.28 Similarly, on his ‘walk around Poplar’ a few years later, Owen Hatherley sees Balfron rising vertiginously, ‘animating its attempt to protect residents from the din and ugliness of the Blackwall approach’: its ‘flats are large and simple, the bared concrete is beautiful, detailed with a craftsman’s obsessiveness, the communal areas largely make sense, and the buildings have an impressive sense of order and controlled drama’.29 For these reasons Balfron is selected alongside Trellick Tower, its sister tower by Goldfinger in west London, in Hilary French’s global survey of Key Urban Housing of the Twentieth Century.30 It is notable how many of these accounts reiterate the scholarship and emotional charge of two articles in 1983 by James Dunnett, a former employee of Goldfinger, which still comprise the most definitive texts on Balfron Tower to date. It is worth quoting at length from Dunnett’s prologue to his first article, in which he argues it is time to take Goldfinger’s work seriously: ‘The moral basis of Goldfinger’s architecture as of all those who, like him, were closely involved with CIAM [the Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne], was the detailed consideration of the environmental conditions conducive to human welfare – whether their analysis is now thought to have been complete or not. The high-rise housing schemes which he built for the GLC were a product of this consideration in every detail, designed to secure ‘sun, space, and greenery’ for their inhabitants. But in Goldfinger’s hands the millennial utopian vision has acquired an air of menace, the ideal has been pushed to its very limits. The sheer scale and drama of their architecture are exciting, but unnerving. Exciting because the control of form is so complete. The rhythms of the facades, founded on the mathematical control of proportion, are a statement of formal architectural values unequalled in this 145

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES country, I would say, since Lutyens, a perfect resolution of horizontal and vertical elements. Raw concrete has rarely seemed so beautiful, its detailing handled with a knowledge beginning with Perret. The sequence of space and form is varied, picturesque, never repetitive: under a low evening sun one has the feeling of participation in an heroic landscape. But it is unnerving not only because of scale – 28 storeys at [Balfron], 30 at [Trellick] – but because of the choice of elements of a distinctly minatory character. It is as though Goldfinger, from among the Functionalist totems, had chosen as a source of inspiration the artefacts of war. The sheer concrete walls of the circulation towers are pierced only by slits; cascading down the facade like rain, they impart a delicate sense of terror … The intellectual power required to create a significant work of art can often seem frightening to others. It requires strength to be inspired by it and not run for cover. Goldfinger’s is a demanding architecture, whose place is at the centre of intellectual life.’31 In this, Dunnett uses oxymoron and metaphors as stark and dramatic as the architectural language of the building to advance an intellectual case intended not only to introduce us to Goldfinger’s buildings but to introduce Goldfinger to the architectural canon. In his companion Architectural Review piece, Dunnett develops Goldfinger’s adherence to the moral and aesthetic tenets of the Modern Movement,32 describing Balfron’s design as ‘a highly original synthesis’. In plan and section, the dual aspect flats served by an enclosed access gallery every third floor are a ‘new’ and ‘satisfying’ response to strict LCC briefs; in elevation, the rhythm of windows, slabs and crosswalls is ‘of profound harmony’, connected by access galleries that ‘resemble a row of railway carriages’ to the detached circulation tower set ‘emphatically to one side’ which Dunnett calls ‘perhaps Goldfinger’s most expressive invention’ (Figure 8.2).

FIGURE 8.2 , ABOVE Balfron Tower, west elevation, 1965. 146

This work was cited heavily by English Heritage a decade later in a spot listing instigated by a resident to interrupt the Department of Transport’s plans to replace Balfron’s windows on the east façade because of the Highways Agency’s roadwidening of the Blackwall Tunnel approach. Their listing description provides a straightforward account of the arrangement, design and detailing of the tower; offering brief moments of praise for Balfron’s ‘unusually well thought-out’ internal finishes, the ‘distinctive profile that sets it apart from

CHAPTER EIGHT DAVID ROBERTS other tall blocks’, and that, ‘more importantly, it proved that such blocks could be well planned and beautifully finished, revealing Goldfinger as a master in the production of finely textured and long-lasting concrete masses’.33 The second trend across these academic accounts measures Balfron against currently held urban ideals today. Conservation specialist Martin O’Rourke’s chapter in Preserving Post-War Heritage (2001) describes how the ‘wave of optimism that characterised the post-war period of fifty years ago is difficult to appreciate in our more guarded and cynical times. It was an era when market forces and spending limits counted for less than social cohesion and better living standards for all.’34 He advocates revisiting ‘earlier modern attempts to reshape the city’ which serve as ‘inspirational beacons against which to test our own feeble attempts at a robust celebration of urbanism’, citing ‘Balfron Tower and its attendant building group’ specifically as they ‘constitute a major achievement of full-blooded modern architecture in the post-war period. It demonstrates that a social housing programme can be achieved with dramatic and high-quality architecture.’ In his entry on the Brownfield Estate to a 2013 Design Museum exhibition, Lesser Known Architecture, Owen Hatherley agrees: ‘These pieces of inner city architectural sculpture are fragments of a better, more egalitarian and more fearless kind of city than the ones we actually live in.’35 Perhaps because of this, the third trend to observe from this scholarship is a desire to piece together Balfron’s social history and the social elements in its design.In his biography Ernő Goldfinger: The Life of an Architect, the philosopher Nigel Warburton quotes some of Balfron’s original inhabitants and reappraises the ‘sociological experiment’ of 1968 in which Goldfinger and his wife Ursula moved to a flat at the top of the tower for its opening two months to diligently gather empirical knowledge.36 Warburton sees this as not only ‘a public commitment to the virtues of high-rise living’ but an opportunity ‘to give a far more informed opinion of the benefits and problems when he had experienced them himself’. In her article for the Twentieth Century Society, historian Ruth Oldham mines the archives further and transcribes Ursula Goldfinger’s diary notes from their stay, concluding an ‘overall feeling one gets is of great support for this huge experimental building that her husband has built, and of absolute conviction that they should learn as much as they can from it’.37 Before concluding on these three academic trends, I wish to turn to Goldfinger’s exceptionally thorough archive, bequeathed to the RIBA upon his death, from which we can build a fuller picture of this ‘sociological experiment’.38 Goldfinger requested privately to live in the block from February to April 1968 to document and assess his designs for high-rise living. Under Housing Committee Chairman Horace Cutler, the GLC accepted and elected to generate publicity around this. At Balfron Tower’s completion in 1968, Goldfinger, not averse to a bit of publicity, informed the assembled group of national and international reporters that he wished 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 whistling around the tower, and any problems which might arise from my designs so that I can correct them in the future’ (Figure 8.3).39 Dozens of widely supportive articles quote Goldfinger’s pitch for high-rise living enthusiastically: ‘After six days of life high above the East End, Mr Goldfinger said: “I am enjoying this no end. I would love to live here”’.40 147

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES A few days later, he told a different reporter: ‘I have created here nine separate streets on nine different levels, all with their own rows of front doors. A community spirit is still possible even in these tall blocks, and any criticism that it isn’t is just rubbish.’41 In these articles, it is most revealing how little the building is mentioned. For the national and architectural press, the drama is instead in the Goldfingers’ eight-week stay, treated with varying measures of amusement and admiration (Figure 8.4). After laughs have subsided, an earnest (but brief) debate emerges in the editorial pages of the architectural press. One article, entitled ‘Out of Touch,’ muses on the nature of design and the relationship between built environment professionals and their users: ‘When Ernő Goldfinger occupied one of the Poplar flats for the purpose of “sociological experiments”, he was tacitly making an admission for the whole profession, by and large, that architects are out of touch with the community which they supposedly serve … For the architect, as a member of a profession, enjoys economic and social privileges which lift him out of the mainstream of daily experience shared by the majority of the population – a disastrous situation for an artist. Professionally and socially, his life is hermetic … How can he know what urbanism means to others, the majority, who are less favourably placed? How can he assess what life is like in a council flat served by the amenities of Wapping? How can he devise the best form of envelope to contain a way of life he does not understand?’ 42

FIGURE 8.3 , ABOVE Ernő Goldfinger, Desmond Plummer and Horace Cutler at the beginning of the Goldfingers’ sociological experiment, 1968. 148

These press articles were collected fastidiously by Goldfinger, cut out and compiled into hardback notebooks available to view alongside private letters, notebooks and receipts (Figure 8.5). When he is not addressing reporters or conducting interviews for the BBC, Ernő Goldfinger attends an array of meetings including with the Tenants’ Association and composes letters in response to sincere queries from members of the public who have contacted him following the news reports. Ursula Goldfinger fastidiously writes a diary which concentrates on the day to day use of the building: whether doors can be opened while pushing a pram, where to store things.43 As well as productively dividing their time, the Goldfingers visit other flats together, recording encounters with those expressing delight at their new homes, as well as famously inviting tenants floor-byfloor to their penthouse for champagne parties where they mingled with notepads, collating opinions on the new homes in order to document and remedy design issues.

CHAPTER EIGHT DAVID ROBERTS The records reveal a balance of praise and criticism through observation and conversation with other residents, establishing a strong relationship with residents (who make Goldfinger an honorary member of the Tenants’ Association). The Goldfingers take the building and residents as evidence, conducting far more work than they have ever been given credit for in decades of accounts since, and demonstrating an empirical conviction to their endeavour. Based on his experiences and residents’ feedback, Goldfinger wrote a report for the GLC dismissing any design issues and organisational difficulties as ‘trivial’ and concluding, ‘On the whole, the general disposition of the buildings and the flats are acceptable. I am prepared to repeat the same design in future schemes.’44 The only time he strays from unadorned observation is when he sets out how to improve communal areas: ‘For teenagers, rooms have been built in the service tower, away from the dwellings for: a) table tennis and/or billiards. b) jazz/ pop room. c) hobby room, which can also be used for older people.’ In this description, lifted from ideas in Ursula Goldfinger’s diary, he picks out the spaces and social facilities provided for different age groups, explicitly aligning the form of the circulation tower and the podium in front to the communal activity he wishes to take place there. He places social considerations at the heart of his report: ‘The success of any scheme depends on the human factor – the relationship of people to each other and the frame to their daily life which the building provides. These particular buildings have the great advantage of having as tenants, families with deep roots in the immediate neighbourhood. In fact, most families have been re-housed from the adjoining streets. Of the 160 families, all except two, came from the Borough of Tower Hamlets. The nine access corridors form so many East End pavements, on which the normal life of the neighbourhood continues. On seven of these pavements there are 18 front doors while, on two levels – the ground floor and the 15th floor where there are maisonettes, there are 8 front doors. As far as possible, people from the same area were re-housed together – street by street.’45

FIGURE 8.4, ABOVE Louis Hellman cartoon, Architects’ Journal, 21 February 1968.

Fifteen years later, Goldfinger was to bring up the human factor again in a brief interview.46 ‘Of course,’ he replied when asked if he would design his two high-rise housing schemes in the same way again, and proceeded: 149

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES ‘I would like to add a few words regarding the controversy of “high-rise” buildings. The main trouble with “high-rise” buildings in this country is the incompetence of managements: 1.

Rehousing is done in a haphazard way. For instance, so called “problem families” are dumped into unfamiliar surroundings, saddled with rents they cannot afford and are given practically no help to adjust

2.

Maintenance is lamentable

3.

Supervision is inadequate, incompetent and spiteful

4.

Vandalism is practically encouraged by persons who are antagonistic to this sort of development

5.

Tenants who are satisfied just let it be … only those who are dissatisfied complain

6.

The only complaint I came across – when living on the top floor of one of the buildings I designed and when I had my office at the foot of another for three years – was high rent’.47

These were to be Goldfinger’s last words on Balfron Tower before his death four years later. He could not have imagined the resurgence of admiration and popularity of his towers. His irate and combative response testifies to the hostility with which the public regarded tower blocks. From this we can conclude two points. The first concerns the importance of this body of scholarship. The vast majority of academic accounts addressing Balfron Tower appeared well after the listing decision in 1996, a time in which post-war high-rises were still very much out of favour. It was Dunnett’s rigorous writings and sustained campaigning against popular opinion in the preceding decades that helped build the case for Balfron to be recognised by English Heritage. Other work since has validated this case and enriched Dunnett’s work. Although academic recognition is by no means enough to sway political agendas, as exemplified by the fate of Alison and Peter Smithson’s neighbouring Robin Hood Gardens (soon to be demolished), such work remains necessary as it is the foundation for any re-evaluation to occur. The second point concerns what is missing from these accounts. In decades of scholarship on Balfron Tower, the tower’s residents – once the object and focus of Goldfinger’s research on the tower – have been overlooked. This omission is important. It does not make these accounts invalid, but it does make them incomplete. Scholars can justly claim the tower’s distinction compared with the environmental and technical deficiencies that have afflicted other high-rise blocks, but without consulting successive generations of residents and engaging in discussions on Balfron’s social life, persistent accusations of social suitability remain unaddressed. The perception of failure that Forty observed in public opinion of post-war architecture still haunts the tower.

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‘IT OPENED UP A NEW WORLD TO ME’: ENGAGEMENT WITH BALFRON’S CURRENT AND FORMER RESIDENTS In 2013, halfway into my doctoral research on another east London housing estate, I was invited by Balfron Tower resident Felicity Davies to assist her in conducting an oral history project as her neighbours were leaving their homes to make way for refurbishment works. The refurbishment was part of an urban regeneration scheme that had begun in 2008 following stock transfer of the public housing estate from Tower Hamlets Borough Council to Poplar Housing and Regeneration Community Association (HARCA). The public focus and funding that accompanied preparations for the London 2012 Olympic Games was the catalyst for a regeneration vision for the borough which aimed to refurbish properties to Decent Homes standards, improve public spaces and add new affordable and private homes to create ‘mixed-communities’. The plans detailed that approximately half of Balfron Tower’s 146 dwellings would be sold to cross-subsidise the costly refurbishment of a Grade II listed building – which had degraded under a piecemeal approach to maintenance and repairs – to heritage standards.48 In 2010, however, the housing association informed the tenants of the 99 socially rented households in the tower (approximately half of which had registered their intention to stay) that it was ‘possible but not probable’ they would have a right of return to their homes following the works, citing ‘the impact of the global financial downturn’ and planning setbacks on the estate as the reasons for this uncertainty.49

FIGURE 8.5, ABOVE Ernő Goldfinger, 1968.

We began our project with one-to-one interviews with residents using an oral history approach which opens with residents’ first impressions of the tower and moves backwards and forwards from this point – where had they come from, what has happened since – to build a fuller picture of their relationship with the tower and to understand how profoundly these experiences are shaped by personal circumstance. Without fail, and without prompting, every interview referred back to the most famous resident 47 years ago: the architect himself. As our ambitions for the project developed, we became interested in how to re-stage this archival material on site, and brought in two other practitioners to collaborate.Together with oral historian Polly Rodgers and theatremaker Katharine Yates we conceived 151

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES of a series of performative workshops, running in parallel with oral history interviews, re-enacting Goldfinger’s own empirical methods during his ‘sociological experiment’ to share collective knowledge and experience. These workshops were informed and inspired by architectural historian and designer Jane Rendell’s praxis of site-writing which ‘enacts a new kind of art criticism, one which draws out its spatial qualities, aiming to put the sites of the critic’s engagement with art first’, and forged new connections with critical acts of re-enactment and engagement articulated in the work of performance theorists Rebecca Schneider, Heike Roms and Jen Harvie.50 We set up a poster at community events and bingo afternoons as an invitation for residents to meet their neighbours of 45 years ago. We held workshops from September 2013 to March 2014, bringing us into conversation with 30 current and former residents of Balfron Tower. In our first, we hosted a champagne (actually discount cava) party in a neighbouring flat to the Goldfingers’ on the top floor. I scripted the dialogue of actors playing Ernő and Ursula Goldfinger based on archival excerpts as well as other brief exchanges between the couple taken from oral history recordings (Figure 8.6).51 ‘ The Goldfingers’ mingled throughout the evening, asking current residents the same questions about their everyday experience of the tower as they did 47 years ago, this time using audio recorders, not notepads, to record conversations in a dialogue between past and present. I had dressed each room of the two-bed flat with archival material in situ: isometric sketches alongside press cuttings in the study; the many letters that Ernő had written to members of the public in the bedroom; and early photographs of the tower in the living room. The evening concluded with a set of film screenings and talks, including by James Dunnett who spoke about Docomomo, a conservation organisation that campaigns to raise awareness of the ideas and heritage of modern movement buildings, before a short excerpt of a BBC interview with Goldfinger during his stay in the tower.52 Our final workshop was held at the community centre at the foot of the tower in March 2014. We used the occasion to announce that the RIBA had approved our proposal to add our oral history interviews and any further documents residents wish to donate to their Goldfinger collection – updating the records with 47 years’ lived experience. The event re-enacted an occasion when Goldfinger attended an early Tenants Association meeting but, according to the archival record, contributed to the agenda only once, letting the residents share their thoughts openly and without interruption. The actor playing Goldfinger returned to recount his solitary line and it then opened to a group discussion between this community of outgoing residents who shared stories, opinions and feelings – particularly about the renovation and decant of the tower – as they negotiated the array of archives available around the room and on tables. Performing this construction of evidence made the subjectivity and staging of it explicit, allowing the archive, normally seen as having a fixed, authoritative character, to become alive to a more democratic chorus of voices. Before I reflect on these oral history interviews and group workshops, I draw on residents’ own words from them to identify how this building has framed residents’ daily life and relationships to each other, categorised under six headings:53

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CHAPTER EIGHT DAVID ROBERTS Domestic experience – Common to residents is a feeling of intimidation upon first seeing Balfron, a building many would have never imagined inhabiting. This evokes negative associations, the ‘kind of thing that you think of with inner-city tower blocks, but actually I found it to be a very different experience when I moved in.’ ‘When I knew I had to live here and I didn’t have any choice, I wanted to run away, I didn’t know anything about the tower. As soon as I moved in to the 21st floor I just totally fell in love with it.’ Instead of the powerful metaphors of war coined by Dunnett, the terms they invoke are more blunted and benign. ‘I know architects think it’s a marvellous thing but it’s just another building to me.’ ‘It’s a very trendy thing now, it’s in fashion – what I like about it is being inside it.’ Interior layouts – Residents value the organisation and character of interior layouts, ‘It’s a lovely size in terms of the flat and I love the design’. ‘I think the flats are wonderful places to live.’ ‘I can’t think of anything I’d change in this flat.’ (Figures 8.7 and 8.8) The flats delighted first tenants as they were bigger and lighter than anything they were used to – ‘it was like a palace’ – and are still recognised as superior today: ‘The flats are a great size, spacious – a luxury considering all the shoe boxes being built’, ‘It’s a better design than anything now,’ offering ‘the space to reflect and create’; ‘to live in I don’t think you can get much better’. However, many households on social rent in the tower, particularly Bengali Muslim families, have come to live in overcrowded conditions and would relish the opportunity to move to dwellings with more bedrooms.

FIGURE 8.6, ABOVE Actors playing Ernő and Ursula Goldfinger at workshop, Balfron Tower, 2013.

Materials and detailing – Over decades of changing fashions, the interiors have been decorated to different tastes – overlaid brick cladding, thick pile carpets, patterned wallpaper – but many of the original design features remain and have lasted well, such as the full-height timber windows, light switches set into door frames and pre-cast flower boxes that have encouraged wildlife – herons, peregrine falcons and ‘squirrels [that] made it regularly to what I assume was the 23rd floor’. ‘The planters are very useful. Since living here my flatmate and I have really got into tomato and marigold growing.’ Residents admire the ‘tremendous force attached to its material and its detailing’ and the privacy that comes from ‘very good soundproofing’ and ‘low noise from neighbouring flats’ which enable some to feel ‘enclosed and safe’. A mother described how it was a nice environment to raise her baby in Balfron ‘because the flats were quiet’ and ‘really well designed’. 153

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FIGURES 8.7 AND 8.8, ABOVE Balfron Tower, floor plans and site layout, 1965. 154

CHAPTER EIGHT DAVID ROBERTS Quality of light and views – Most flats are double aspect except those on the south-face that are triple, and two-person flats featuring a sash window in the kitchen which opens onto the walkway facing east. Though residents complain that the full-height partially glazed screens can be draughty, they cherish the quantity and quality of light they provide. ‘Goldfinger designed with an awful lot of light. You live in the space in a different way. It affects your being. And that’s critical to your entire existence.’ No matter how high residents live, with different proportions of city and sky, the view has become vital to a sense of spaciousness and belonging. It enhances the space in flats, giving the feeling ‘like you have an outdoor space in your front room’, that ‘extend[s] outside the boundaries of our living room’, but also of the estate, ‘The view, not just outwards towards the London skyline but inwards towards the Brownfield area. It’s a very communal view and often there are kids playing in the sunken playground. It’s been lovely these past few weeks of summer to come home and have a cup of tea on the balcony and just listen to the sound of activity below.’ (Figure 8.9) The view is a source of personal contemplation and identity. ‘The fact that it’s in the sky is so important to it. I do feel a Londoner up here, ironically, you do see the cranes, you see the horizon as it changes, to see the Gherkin being built, to see the Shard, incredible.’ ‘Especially at night ’cos everything was lit up … To me it was just like fairy lights. It was like fairy land, truly.’ One resident who has lived with the view for 20 years fetched a small postcard print of German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog during our interview: ‘That’s me looking out of the window, that’s how I feel looking out of the window. That’s my image of my life in the flat overlooking London.’ The view is also a backdrop and focus to the conduct of communal relationships: ‘You don’t really watch TV when you live somewhere with a nice view... every time you look out you can see different things.’ Residents often contextualised their experience within the prevailing tendency in London to replace post-war social housing with privatised towers: ‘We felt magnificent being up there. The view – we could see Battersea Power Station on a good day – you see everything from there. I think for social housing tenants to lose the view is such a terrible theft of experience.’ Communal experience – The first to move in remember the sociability concomitant with existing communal ties. ‘I was here 40-odd years. I loved it. Everyone would help one another. You knew your next-door neighbour, you knew everyone. Even in the block, because as we moved the whole street moved into the block with us. So we still knew everyone and there was such a friendship and everything.’ When asked about the communal experience today, residents acknowledge the consequences of long periods of poor social policy and unfailingly mention the two lifts that never appear to have been quick or reliable enough. They stand for the lack of sufficient funds for repair and improvement that has afflicted the building in spite of decades of demands from residents, leading to concrete spalling, corroded wiring conduits, leaking pipes and vermin infestations. The eventual installation of a door-entry system at Balfron curtailed instances of anti-social behaviour, but with the hobby rooms sealed off and long forgotten, residents feel the tower is missing spaces to facilitate communal interaction. Yet the feeling of neighbourliness is not restricted to Balfron’s early golden age. The nine distinct corridors which lead to three levels of flats offer ‘more chance of meeting neighbours’ and can be a ‘great place to meet the neighbours and chat’. The intimacy these spaces provide is unexpected: 155

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES ‘it is the first time in my life I’ve got to know my neighbours’, the ‘friendliness isn’t something I’ve experienced in other parts of London’. ‘The ethnic community has changed … I am proud that I am a member of a community that includes a staff sister, a child psychologist, a retired woodworker, Somali artists. People from all walks of life and cultural backgrounds. I am proud to be in Balfron Tower, and to be in Tower Hamlets. This is part of my identity.’ Collective memory – The longest-serving residents remember meeting Goldfinger at his parties. ‘He introduced himself and he asked our opinion of different things, what we thought of this and that. And he weighed it all in, so that when he built the other building, he done the adjustments, you know what I mean … He noticed it all and he righted it.’ Similar anecdotes have survived generations of new residents through continued conversations between neighbours, that have meant residents are well informed and inspired by its history. ‘Trellick is more famous, but this place is more close to his heart in the fact that he lived here.’ ‘I tapped into the Goldfinger thing, I painted my whole flat gold … I felt I could be really creative here ... [it] opened up a new world to me.’ In each of the oral history interviews we had conducted, residents lamented the lack of opportunities for communal interaction in the tower today. The workshops opened a social, discursive and imaginative space that brought different residents from different tenures together into one space to talk to one another. In this sense, our re-staging touched on the spirit of the original endeavour; a community was not just re-enacted but, if only temporarily, reconstituted. There was a considerable level of engagement with the material on display. Dressing a flat that is identical to residents’ homes as an archive makes it estranging and uncanny, and it forced people to see their own flats differently and acted as a trigger for memories (Figure 8.10). Alongside the informal theatricality, it created a setting where people stepped outside their daily routine into a mode of critical reflection, to re-examine their estate, their flats and themselves. FIGURE 8.9, ABOVE Residents on balcony during workshop, Balfron Tower, 2013. FIGURE 8.10, ABOVE Residents in kitchen and living room during workshop, Balfron Tower, 2013. 156

Residents engaged enthusiastically with the performative premise and spoke freely in their own terms about their homes and the process of regeneration, to each other and to the actors, telling ‘Goldfinger’ of his inspiration to them or telling him off for the things that did not work. As the interviews and

CHAPTER EIGHT DAVID ROBERTS encounters progressed, I witnessed how knowledgeable the residents were about the process of refurbishment and the design and quality of their homes but, despite this, they bemoaned the lack of clarity and certainty about the regeneration and their own place within it.

‘ON BOTH ARCHITECTURAL AND SOCIAL GROUNDS, A PLACE WHICH NEEDS PRESERVING’: ACTIVISM The processes of regeneration that had begun during my engagement with residents accelerated in the year leading up to the submission of refurbishment plans in September 2015. Housing association Poplar HARCA entered a joint venture partnership with property developers Londonewcastle and Telford Homes, recruiting architects Studio Egret West and designer Ab Rogers to develop proposals for external and internal physical alterations that would transform the character and tenure of Balfron Tower.54 Below, I summarise our objections to these plans and actions we took beforehand on the grounds of accountable regeneration and informed heritage. Accountable Regeneration – The application’s 130 documents do not contain a statement on the future tenure of Balfron Tower’s 146 flats, an omission which indicates full privatisation and a resultant loss of 99 homes on social rent. This was in keeping with Poplar HARCA’s policy after October 2010, as they continued to advise tenants that it was ‘possible but not probable’ they would have a right of return to their homes, offering instead assistance to relocate.55 In this time, tenants had sent moving letters of appeal to local newspapers and all levels of representative democracy, drafted online petitions and submitted Freedom of Information requests, but no further information or financial models were released to justify this decision. It was during our project of interviews and workshops that I had come to realise this proposed privatisation had escaped media, cultural, intellectual and resident scrutiny, in part because of the difficulty of accessing and understanding material related to these complex and contested processes of change. This chimed with the experience of other campaign groups in London where information has been withheld or legislative definitions invoked ambiguously to cover a chasm between the promises and realities of social housing provision.56 As such, six months before the planning application was submitted, I produced an online archive in the hope that access to the full range of information on the history and future of the tower would enable the regeneration process to be subject to critical scrutiny and the force of informed public debate. Although it was late in the regeneration process, if there was still a potential opportunity to intervene and protect the provision of social housing in Balfron Tower as so strongly desired by current tenants and essential to its principles and purpose, then inaction, to me, seemed unethical. I collaborated with designer Duarte Carrilho da Graça to make www.balfrontower.org, an open-access website as a vehicle to communicate this volume of material which playfully reflects the aesthetic of Balfron Tower – an impossibly tall tower of 120 documents spanning five decades.57 These include adverts, architectural history accounts, archival records, art projects, blog articles, conservation management plans, council minutes, documentary films, feature films, financial viability reports, freedom of information requests, health reports, listing nominations, literary fiction, music videos, planning applications, press articles, promotional videos, public lectures, regeneration strategies and resident oral history testimonies. In their original form, these documents can be intimidating, difficult to access (because they are hidden 157

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES behind archival protocols, journal subscription costs and labyrinthine planning portals) or difficult to understand because of bureaucratic, academic or legal language. When the user clicks on these documents they are whisked away to other pages, from which unabridged versions of the documents can be downloaded in full or selected key quotes and explanatory comments viewed. The user can also find a list of 13 questions, each of which, when clicked, provides a short answer and selects relevant documents from the timeline below, assembling quotes which act to provide a more detailed response. The website differs substantially from a typical academic output: rather than an authored article that takes time to polish and publish, it presents all relevant documents for the public to easily draw upon, opening up resources for scrutiny and providing the user the ability to construct their own narrative around the evidence in their own terms. The documents included made clear the statutory affordable housing targets and best practice guidelines on accountable regeneration that the planning application failed to meet. Informed Heritage – on the second point of our objection, the planning application provides a detailed account of the history of the tower, drawing extensively from the excellent Conservation Management Plan produced by Avanti Architects in 2007, which sets out its evidential, historical, architectural and communal heritage value.58 The Design and Access Statement describes Balfron Tower as having been ‘designed with an exceptional attention to detail for a social housing project’ and ‘conceived with a spirit of 1960s optimism, designed to create contemporary housing for the masses and nurture a sense of community’. The importance of the tower’s purpose as social housing for local communities is reinforced by the ‘Hierarchy of significance’. The first point in this section addresses the ‘social and political context’, noting: ‘The need for high quality housing to serve a modern post-war Britain informed Balfron’s design. This is significant in historic and architectural terms.’59 The ‘Summary of significance’ concludes, ‘The iconic nature of the building, being a major selling point, needs to be conserved in its essence, according to the hierarchy of the above attributes.’60 Before I turn to this ‘major selling point’, it is important to address the three ways in which the planning application diverges from Avanti’s recommendations. Aesthetically, the plans set out the removal of the surviving original white-painted timber windows to be replaced with boxsection brown anodised aluminium windows alongside stripping out existing flat plans – except for one of each type to be retained – to be replaced by ‘open plan’ layouts. Functionally, they transform these dwellings that were overwhelmingly allocated for social rent into properties for sale on the private market. Finally, in terms of consultation approach, the plans state, ‘As the building is Grade II Listed with design and refurbishment works needing careful consideration to comply with complex planning and heritage requirements, it was not felt appropriate to consult more widely on detailed design and heritage matters’.61 A number of stakeholders were consulted but these included neither current and former residents of the tower nor the wider estate community. To exclude residents who know the building most intimately and assume they could not engage meaningfully in complex discussions is contemptible, especially considering Ernő Goldfinger’s own methods of resident engagement. This selective reading of Goldfinger’s principles can be further witnessed in the design approach. The development partners state they intend to ‘help realise the vision that Ernő Goldfinger had for it over half a century ago’,62 adding, ‘We want to invoke Goldfinger’s original optimistic spirit 158

CHAPTER EIGHT DAVID ROBERTS and sensitively refurbish Balfron Tower to be a shining exemplar of contemporary living again, this time for the 21st century.’63 The inference from these statements is that refurbishment plans can deliver a vision Goldfinger himself was unable to achieve, reinforced by the intimation that the tower is no longer fit for purpose. They also position Goldfinger’s ‘optimistic spirit’ as a cultural cache which, along with the ‘iconic nature of the building’, is invoked as a ‘major selling point’ to be marketed instead of principles and homes to preserve. The misconception at the heart of these design proposals is a fundamental distinction between heritage that pays tribute to these egalitarian principles and heritage that enacts these principles. In anticipation of this, I assisted James Dunnett in writing a Grade II* listing upgrade nomination in August 2014, over a year before the planning application was submitted. Our reasons were threefold; firstly, we believed all of Goldfinger’s work on the Brownfield Estate – including specifically the spaces between the buildings which can be vulnerable to development pressures – should be protected to recognise their exceptional architectural quality. Secondly, an enhanced level of listing would ensure Historic England’s active involvement in assessing any application for listed building consent, and thirdly, the current listing descriptions should be elaborated on to reflect the social elements in the design. On this final point, the principles and grounds of our argument explicitly emphasised the importance of Balfron’s social context, integral to the vision and function of the building and an intrinsic part of its architectural heritage. I had been inspired by campaigners fighting against the conversion of Berthold Lubetkin’s Finsbury Health Centre, and by architectural writer and local councillor Emma Dent Coad, who represents the residents of the Cheltenham Estate comprising Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower. Dent Coad had issued a rallying cry on preserving such buildings: ‘we must get our hands dirty to engage politically, comprehensively and at the right time… If we determine that social purpose must also be conserved, we must look beyond physical conservation and commit to keeping these homes in the social sector.’64 Dunnett produced a rigorous history of the tower, noting: ‘It would be regrettable if the Tower were to be converted into just more housing units on the private open market – as is in prospect: its architectural “message” would be compromised.’65 I accompanied this with a supplementary document devoted to residents’ experiences, challenging the dominant discourse that Balfron Tower has failed, identifying the aspects of the building that residents cherished, and to testify to its ongoing social function.66 And Owen Hatherley wrote a statement in support, concluding: ‘The listing of buildings should always be careful not to be just a matter of listing a few lone “icons” to be preserved as toys, and be careful not to list buildings as shells that can be filled with anything, particularly when their purpose is still very much needed. On this basis I support the listing of the Brownfield Estate as a whole as a coherent, well made and complete example of public housing well above the current standard of private housing - and which must stay as public housing, in an area that desperately needs it. On both architectural and social grounds, this is a place which needs preserving.’67 By the time Tower Hamlets Development Committee met to consider the planning application in December 2015, the archive website had been viewed by residents, community groups and the wider public 12,000 times. Alongside this, I had drafted a fully referenced statement of objection, which was used as the basis of a petition coordinated by tireless resident and campaign groups 159

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES (Balfron Social Club and Tower Hamlets Renters), amassing the support of 2,800 people in its first week.68 Our objections were further articulated by an Architects’ Journal article by residents;69 enriched by objections on aesthetic grounds by Docomomo-UK and the Twentieth Century Society;70 and amplified by a speech drawing explicitly on our research by Baron Cashman in a debate to the House of Lords on the regeneration of east London.71 This was consolidated by a decision from the other side of the Houses of Parliament. While Balfron Tower Developments had been preparing this planning application, Historic England were completing their year-long assessment of our listing upgrade nomination. One month after the planning application was submitted, the Culture Minister ratified this upgrade to Grade II*.72 The new listing statement recognised the social ideals and purpose of the tower as a key component of its heritage: ‘Balfron Tower was designed as a social entity to re-house a community, according with Goldfinger’s socialist thinking’. And among its ‘principal reasons’ for listing, Historic England noted ‘Architectural interest: a manifestation of the architect’s rigorous approach to design and of his socialist architectural principles’ and ‘Social and historic interest: designed to re-house a local community’.73 I had been driven by the conviction that if all the archival, academic and empirical evidence was presented alongside relevant policy, guidance and precedent, councillors could not help but demand accountability for their socially housed constituents and demand a more informed approach to heritage. Devastatingly, and unanimously, the Development Committee vote to refurbish, and with it any opportunity to prevent the privatisation, passed.74 As we left the council chamber I had in my mind the words of a Municipal Dreams blogpost whose author had foreseen this outcome: ‘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 … [Balfron’s] 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.’75

‘AN EXEMPLAR’: CONCLUDING REMARKS This sustained engagement with residents reaffirmed the duty we have to put our work at the service of those whose lives we seek to improve. Bringing archival, bureaucratic and academic material into their homes opened access for residents to speak to these debates, and to one another, as peers. Residents’ fuller historical accounts challenge the dominant discourse that Balfron Tower has failed. Their testimonies neither reinforce stereotypical images of high-rise housing estates nor hide their faults; instead they display the liveliness, diversity and vibrancy of such estate communities. In doing so, they advance an argument for the continued and urgent need for public housing as these communities and the qualities they bring to London are diluted or dispersed. By collaborating to produce the online archive, listing nomination and campaign we transformed what had been framed and suppressed for five years as a marginal and private issue into a matter of legislative and public concern which held Balfron Tower as a beacon for public housing, against which current regeneration policy was found wanting. 160

CHAPTER EIGHT DAVID ROBERTS In the planning application, the development partners define Balfron Tower as ‘an exemplar of post-war social housing’. They introduce their plans to ‘sensitively refurbish [it] to be a shining exemplar of contemporary living again’, and declare their aim to ‘deliver an exemplar project and provide a legacy that all will be proud of’.76 Rather than an exemplar (this word is repeated 18 times in total), the proposals exemplify the current practice of heritage which strips social housing estates of their egalitarian principles and purpose, exemplify contemporary developments that segregate and stratify local communities, and exemplify an unethical dispossession of social housing in London that constitutes a major contributing factor to the city’s housing crisis. It is perhaps too late for the housing association to reconsider its approach and deliver a truly exemplary project at Balfron Tower, but it is certainly not too late for other developments in London. These could set the benchmark for regeneration and heritage schemes by addressing: accountable regeneration – opening full access to information in order to justify decisions; affordable housing – retaining a proportion of social housing genuinely affordable to local communities; inclusive consultation – developing proposals together with residents in which everyone is able to fully participate; and informed heritage – identifying and preserving shared historical and communal values.

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CHAPTER NINE OUT-OF-SYNC ESTATES BEN CAMPKIN

Former UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s 2016 newspaper article, headlined ‘I’ve put the bulldozing of sink estates at the heart of turnaround Britain’, typifies the – at best – muddled and reductive and – at worst – manipulative ways that historical and other forms of evidence are evoked in political rhetoric on housing.1 Such rhetoric by definition prioritises persuasion over accuracy, but in this chapter I take the content and presentation of Cameron’s words seriously, scrutinising his terms using the methods of demystification offered by historical scholarship. The article, given the alternative titles (and meanings) ‘Prime Minister pledges to transform sink estates’ and ‘Estate regeneration’ in the government’s own press releases, bemoans Modernist social housing and planning as a failure of the state.2 But the position it articulates is itself formulated on the basis of an unreconstructed, universalising, and unsustainable conceptualisation of modernity and urbanity, emphasising the momentum of historical change, and a socially and environmentally regressive conviction that the past can simply be swept away. To explore this tension I pay attention to the language used, looking at contemporary terminology in relation to its 1970s and even earlier, nineteenth-century precedents, and to the way that research is invoked in present-day housing discourse.

INTRODUCTION Theorist of global urbanism Jennifer Robinson has pointed to problems with the way that in urban studies cities have been conceptualised through prioritising ‘the new’, and a specific Western construct of modernity.3 This pursuit, she argues, has privileged certain cities over others, and has universalised the experiences of those cities. The result has been to create detrimental forms of understanding that need to be challenged through new approaches to theorising the urban. On the distortions that the prioritisation of the new inflicts on our understanding of urban history Robinson argues: ‘As an analytical device, valorising the new potentially performs an unhelpful, de-historicising territorialisation. The configuring of a territorialised “new” that isolates an emergent form beyond its engagement with the conditions of possibility of its emergence, and with the range of interconnections that produce it – historically and geographically – is enabled by an assertion of distinctiveness which is frequently framed by forgetfulness or denial.’4

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MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES Since such conceptualisations of the new have filtered through to policy and urban management, with its incessant focus on innovation and novelty, and given the uneven effects of such a pursuit around the globe, this prompts the question of how politicians and others can develop and publicly articulate more ethical alternative models, responding to Robinson’s call to conceptualise cities ‘beyond the new’. Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s formulation of ‘the now’, Robinson argues that we can move forwards by recognising the present as a moment in which multiple pasts coexist and collide, rather than through a linear, positivist, teleological model of history5 – the model, that is, that Cameron expresses. Put another way, ‘the now’ allows us to recognise reductive ways that history is written from an elite perspective (dislocating, displacing, forgetting, denying), and to challenge this through attending to the qualities of the past that make it at once in and out-of-sync with the present. In relation to the extant built fabric, as an outcome structured by historical decisions and conditions – a repository of history and ideology, continuing to function in the present – these qualities are made even more complex. Furthermore, the discourses of the present, and on housing in this case, purport to be new even while they are, more often than not, underpinned by older arguments, evidence and terminologies which return and recirculate with similar or new intent. The question then becomes one of whether we can realise potential from recognising history’s fundamentally out-of-sync dimensions in developing socially progressive historical methods. To develop this argument further, in my analysis of Cameron’s rhetoric I will focus on one metaphor he uses and that was attached to the article in the government press release and in its wider dissemination in the mainstream press: the ‘sink estate’ (or, in its more cautiously qualified, political form, the ‘so-called “sink estate”’).6 Understanding this term helps to position current political and media discourse within a longer history of representations of housing and poverty in Britain. The origins of the ‘sink estate’ categorisation are to be found in left writing on housing, focused on social change, in New Society in the 1970s. Yet between then and now it shifts from sociological descriptor, linked to the close and ethnographic analysis of the empirical realities of specific estates and the lives of their residents, to an imprecise ideologically driven usage as a caricature of dysfunctionality or failure.7 The notion of ‘sink’ reflects and reproduces the anxieties of politicians and other commentators about the latent threat of estates and their residents. The fear, that is, that they are, or could become, out of sync, disrupting the status quo. I will examine the context in which this term emerged in environmental studies and social science terminology of the 1970s, and its historical precedent in nineteenth-century commentaries on ‘the residuum’, concluding by pointing to a more creative understanding of ‘sink’ emerging in science and technology studies today.

RHETORIC AS INTERVENTION In his work on Victorian public discourse, the social historian Geoffrey Crossick notes that language ‘is no mere reflection of external reality, but an intervention within it’.8 For this reason, it is worth architectural historians paying attention to the ebbs and flows, high-rises and sinks, of political rhetoric on housing, even when it may seem all too empty and predictable, or a mere symptom of (rather than an active constituent in) the formation of ideology. Appearing transient, 164

CHAPTER NINE BEN CAMPKIN politicians’ exchanges of words on housing equate in some ways to the market abstractions that powerfully shape transactions in the built environment. Like markets, these cyclical statements have concrete impacts in the world; they are framed and positioned by elites, but they also take on their own agency, once uttered. There is a direct link, of course, in that more than at any time in history, rhetorical statements can immediately and strongly influence housing markets. Today’s housing discourse is often presented in the most neutral of tones, and/or ‘direct’ language, backed up by reassuring quantitative evidence – just as markets are presented as objective truth, or as ‘natural’, while being anything but. Where financial markets and political rhetoric on housing intersect they also have in common a play between a surface register of simplicity, and underlying layers of labyrinthine, obfuscating complexity, only accessible to those with the resources of technical expertise. In British cultural studies, Raymond Williams asserted the value of histories of the most commonplace, naturalised, and apparently neutral of words.9 In architectural history, Adrian Forty has adapted Williams’ approach to the vocabulary of modern architecture, also drawing on Roland Barthes’ semiotic and post-structuralist analyses of everyday codes, language and popular culture.10 Forty, along with scholars in urban studies, has critiqued the ways that in Modernist discourse scientific models and metaphors are detached from their historical and geographic origins, requiring us to trace nuanced trajectories of meaning, and pathways of displacement and substitution. Often, these scholars have noted, scientific terms – including those of urban studies and sociology – are co-opted and used in unintended ways to enforce the dominant logics of urbanisation and/or parochial ‘circuits of knowledge’.11 This requires us to conceptualise the urban, as Robinson argues, through attention to the locatedness of concepts in specific places and times.12 Cameron’s dystopic images of bleak high-rises are so well established as clichés of the media, cultural and political imaginary of UK housing estates as to seem unremarkable.13 There are strong similarities between these statements and Tony Blair’s first prime ministerial speech at the Aylesbury Estate in 1997, where he called for a new approach to urban regeneration that would address entrenched poverty, and mournfully remarked that ‘all that is left of the high hopes of the post-war planners is derelict concrete’.14 If in New Labour’s lexicon there was a revival of nineteenth-century notions of the underclass, in Cameron’s rhetoric there is a return to sociobiological terms, such as ‘sink’, associated with 1970s sociology and ‘environmental determinism’ in architecture and town planning.15 In his article, Cameron’s emphasis in defining his specific place and time is as one of flux, a ‘turnaround decade for Britain’, a maelstrom of change, following ‘state failure over decades’, ‘decades of neglect’: ‘As we tackle this problem, we should learn the lessons from the failed attempts to regenerate estates in the past. A raft of pointless planning rules, local politics and tenants’ concerns about whether regeneration would be done fairly all prevented progress. And if we’re honest, there often just wasn’t the political will and momentum in government to cut through all this to get things done.’16 These few sentences highlight the emblematic use of degraded and forgotten estates in British political and media discourse. Seen through environmental determinist arguments, these ‘failed’ 165

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES estates are a generic problem to be solved, rather than a diversity of places with specific histories and communities. We can also note internal contradiction in calling for history to inform current policy even as the entire town planning system, and its democratic functions, are dismissed as ‘pointless’. It may be true that there is a lack of political will to address housing need and the housing affordability crisis, but given the rate that social rented housing has diminished under successive administrations there has not been a lack of will to ‘get things done’. Instead, it is exactly that will – the neoliberal ideology of pragmatism – that has driven the sale of a wide range of public assets, and has led iteratively to the reduction of the powers of the democratic planning system which Cameron regards with disdain as a barrier to progress.17 The confident expression of this disdain, by a government prepared to be seen as bulldozers who can ‘tear down anything that gets in our way’, does, however, mark a shift away from the cautious tone of social responsibility featured in New Labour’s rhetoric. This demolition persona fits into a logic of ‘spatial cleansing’ that is a characteristic feature of neoliberal urbanism in a variety of contexts, where the fantasy of being able to erase the past and start from scratch is a defining feature.18 Perhaps because of this reckless, aggressive tone, and the specific political moment – the controversial Housing and Planning Act 2016 was passing through Parliament at the time the article was published – these comments provoked much wider commentary and debate.19 The responses in the national press ranged from critiques of the Prime Minister’s underdeveloped estate regeneration strategy, his choice of words, the relatively small budget announced – which in any case turned out to be a loan that would need to be repaid – and the lack of guarantees to vouch for residents to be able to stay in their neighbourhoods, all the way to arguments that those rejecting the government’s position were simply nostalgic leftists who in effect wanted those entrenched in poverty to stay that way.20 The weight of commentary has been critical, however.

EVIDENCE-BASED POLICY OR RESEARCH-SUBSTANTIATED RHETORIC? What evidence is presented to substantiate Cameron’s statement? It is backed up through reference to two main sources. Firstly, an analysis of the London riots of 2011 by Space Syntax Limited is cited – based on the techniques of spatial analysis introduced by Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson at the Bartlett in the 1970s and 1980s, and subsequently commercialised and widely deployed to evaluate spatial characteristics and their social consequences as part of development processes.21 In highlighting this one mapping of the relationship between post-war housing estates and the riots, it is represented as scientifically conclusive as to the cause, and, by implication, the solution. But Space Syntax’s quantitative and morphological study takes its place in a wide field of scholarly analysis.22 It is easy to see how and why Space Syntax’s findings, detached from their context and reduced to a sound bite, might be both reassuring and useful to the Conservative government. Space Syntax has conducted a range of research on London housing estates over a long period, but this research takes its place with a lively arena of academic and professional debate. An exchange in the journal Cities between Jeremy Till, as a critic of the Space Syntax research on the London riots, and Bill Hillier, as the original and lead proponent of Space Syntax, shows how the architectural debates around council housing and the riots form part of a long-running debate about the relationship between space, form and social behaviour in architecture and urban studies.23 166

CHAPTER NINE BEN CAMPKIN The basis of Till’s critique is that the Space Syntax analysis of the riots presents a ‘causal link between space and behaviour, in this particular case the spatiality of post-war housing estates and the act of rioting; [and that] this is a causality that apparently overrides the social and political backdrop.’24 He rather sees the riots as a ‘magnification of the everyday’, or, an eruption of existing, underlying, urban conditions, where ‘the form of the riots is conjoined with the form of the space’ but not determined by it.25 In response, using conventional environmentally deterministic analogies with medicine and disease, Hillier rebuts the claim that Space Syntax is spatially deterministic ‘in a “cause and effect” sense’, and goes on to suggest that the position is in fact closer to Till’s. He gives examples from the history of Space Syntax’s attempts to show how ‘spatial design can radically change the way, and the degree to which, we become aware of other people through everyday activity in public space’, bringing to light ‘spatial mechanisms’ and the ways that images of stigmatisation (the ‘sink estate’) have actual effects.26 Yet no matter where one sits in this debate, in its political articulation all subtlety fades into the reductive and stigmatising claim: ‘as spatial analysis of the riots has shown, the rioters came overwhelmingly from these post-war estates. Almost three quarters of those convicted lived within them. That’s not a coincidence.’27 Of course it would not be politically advantageous for Cameron to highlight the nuances of academic and professional analyses of the riots; and it is easy to see why a quantitative and cartographic interpretation is attractive and lends itself to a rhetoric in which post-war estates cause riots, as opposed to any attempt to engage with the complexities of qualitative evidence, or philosophical and ethical arguments. The second piece of research which Cameron uses to bolster his position on estates is a report arguing for a ‘Complete Streets’ approach to the regeneration of local authority housing estates. The report was funded by – and designed in conversation with – the Cabinet Office, and produced by the residential research unit of real estate company Savills Plc, with Space Syntax again being funded by the government.28 The Savills research was released the day after Cameron’s article was published, and his reference to its imminent publication suggests coordination with the government’s agenda. No brief for this research is in the public domain but it is important to note (which Cameron omits to mention) that Savills is a commercial entity with vested interests in urban development. The company has internationally renowned research capabilities formed through 28 years of research on residential real estate, working for a range of private, public and third sector clients.29 The research conducted by Savills includes both proactive studies on contemporary issues, and studies driven by the needs and interests of their clients and associates in the property sector, such as national government, local authorities and housing associations.30 The particular study referred to by Cameron is a hypothetical investigation that sets out to identify ‘the potential benefits of the Complete Streets approach’ – that is, a street-based, mid-rise approach which densifies development on local authority-owned land – by comparing it to existing ‘block-based’ approaches.31 The purpose, as industry-led research, was to think through the ‘policy and business responses’ and quantify the values that could be realised relative to existing approaches.32 Savills’ approach to value is to see real estate and land values as intrinsically tied to the quality of neighbourhood environments, which includes a conception of social value. This work assumes that government regeneration strategy should proceed from ‘optimal real estate solutions’ and releasing longer-term asset values from public stock; that local 167

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES authorities are sitting on latent assets; and that developers are neglecting the longer-term economic benefits of good quality consultation which genuinely engages housing estate residents.33 The beneficiaries of these values, and any indication of mechanisms for distribution of benefits, are outside of the scope. The main position stated in this report is that the approach to estate regeneration needs to change and that a move to a ‘complete streets’ model will lead to ‘the creation of several hundred thousand new homes on brownfield sites – as well as enhancing the lives of existing residents; building London community and commercial capacity in line with residential growth and regenerating surrounding areas’. 34 Densification of development on land is needed, the authors argue, on estates that feature ‘poorly managed green open space’ which can ‘de-value surroundings’.35 The report’s preoccupation with ‘attractive neighbourhoods’ corresponds with a government emphasis on ‘new private homes, built attractively’ to cross-subsidise estate regeneration.36 The authors prioritise the importance of streets and their ability – in contrast with block-based schemes associated with recent regeneration – to produce coherent urban fabric. This is reinforced by invoking the endurance and success of existing ‘traditional’ London streets and the wealthy areas characterised by them: ‘We argue that street-based urban fabric is more capable of change and adaptation than blocks of single use buildings in an open landscape. The fact that so much of London’s street pattern, within different use and ownership configurations, has endured for centuries is testament to this.’37 The authors take pains to emphasise they are not positing ‘simple reproduction of historic street patterns and buildings’ but rather arguing for new streets informed by traditional urbanism serving contemporary needs. Traditional urbanism is not defined, however, and seemingly discounts traditions of Modernist urbanism.38 The Savills’ report is based on a three-month research programme which was mainly quantitative in its methods, involving the identification of local authority housing estate land, and the measurement of its present utilisation, and its potential capacity to densify. It is partly based on an analysis of six estates, the locations and identities of which have been disguised, with a summary of the housing and additional value that could be elicited through Complete Streets, in comparison with the dominant model of block-based property-led regeneration which the report refers to as ‘Contemporary Regeneration’. It is underpinned by extensive financial calculations, and based on spatial analysis by Space Syntax Limited, and detailed considerations of selected scenarios for the six sites. The case studies were chosen by Savills and were anonymised and disguised because the company was keen to avoid controversy or alarm if residents misread what Savills understood to be hypothetical research as actual proposals.39 However, the identities of these estates have been partly exposed by activists who managed to determine block identities using crossreferencing with maps and images available in the public domain.40 Leaving aside the content of the proposals for the Complete Streets approach, the way in which this research has been commissioned and used to substantiate Cameron’s article is symptomatic of a problematic relationship between evidence, policy and political rhetoric which is currently a matter of wider concern in scientific and public debate.41 The origins of the 168

CHAPTER NINE BEN CAMPKIN research – the important information that it was specifically produced for the Cabinet Office by Savills, without a public tendering process, is not mentioned; nor is the fact that the government influenced the research design and presentation. Sleight of hand is also evident when we consider that the Savills report – like the Space Syntax research – only focuses on London, and yet Cameron’s comments extrapolate from it to describe estates in the UK more generally. There are a number of issues which make it difficult for the public to determine the rigour of the research and therefore its findings. The methodology section gives a basic overview of the methods used but does not give a rationale for the decisions that were made about why the methods were chosen, how the case studies were selected, why they were deemed representative of London estates as a whole, what sources were consulted to understand them, which examples of ‘Contemporary Regeneration’ were explored, or how or why certain assumptions were made – such as excluding demolition, decanting and Compulsory Purchase Order from the financial projections. Nor is it clear why other alternative models – such as developing on Green Belt land – were not explored, or were ruled out. Has Contemporary Regeneration been evaluated in terms of outcomes for residents?42 The public do not have access to the Savills archive so they only have the report and its appendices to understand the evidence and the basis from which it has been interpreted.

HISTORICAL EVIDENCE IN THE CASE FOR ‘COMPLETE STREETS’ The Savills research is justly critical of the short-termism of recent regeneration models. Through invoking ‘traditional urbanism’ it also, as we have seen, uses historical arguments of a kind to substantiate the proposed model of development. However, the approach to history focuses on the evolution of morphology rather than social or economic conditions, with a nebulously defined ‘traditional urbanism’ as the benchmark of successful urban design. Captioned images of streets from ancient civilisations are given in a method of visual citation and cross-referencing not unlike those favoured by Modernist architects such as Le Corbusier, or later echoed by the Canadian architect Oscar Newman in Defensible Space.43 Unsurprisingly, given the scope of the report, the authors avoid a detailed assessment of architectural Modernism or its outcomes. Instead, in attempting to outline a new model for regeneration that can be generically applied, Modernism is reduced to a problem: the lack of fit between the low densities of the 1960s and today’s need for a more intensive (profitable) use of space. They deploy a rationalist approach to planning which on some levels is a legacy of Modernism, so that urban planning is primarily seen as a question of efficiency. But outcomes are measured in terms of the appreciation of built assets for landowners, rather than the Modernist interest in efficiency in the name of welfare and the public good. This research, which privileges quantitative and morphological data, is detached from the social history of these estates, and the evidence that qualitative methods might afford. The researchers’ interaction with specific estates is primarily mediated, from a distance. That is understandable as a short desk-based and hypothetical exercise. But the research does make general claims about features of post-war estates as a whole which it would only be possible to evidence fully with reference to detailed knowledge of specific circumstances. For example: 169

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES ‘Given that many properties, particularly social housing built before the 1980s, are now in need of considerable capital expenditure, are environmentally sub-standard (sometimes costing occupants large fuel bills) and often, through their design, are expensive to maintain and fail to integrate with the wider city, the case for regeneration could be made.’44 Such statements refer to contested aspects of Modernist built environments and raise questions about what criteria are in use to evaluate standards as well as about the representative range of samples the researchers have considered. Even though the balance of the Savills report is not towards estate demolition options, it does not rule demolition out, and it is easy to see how its claims make for easy manipulation into a political rhetoric which, in headline and tone, is weighted towards demolition as a broad-brush approach, even alongside a gesture to regeneration.45 There is one qualitative dimension to the Savills research: a survey, conducted with a small sample of what appears to be a very narrow demographic of industry experts. The lack of diversity and the notable exclusion of residents’ voices are in tension with the significant weighting given to this evidence, and also with the findings of the interviews themselves which place emphasis – as Savills relay, but which Cameron neglects – on the need for genuine engagement with residents to ensure the success of regeneration, and to counter distrust accumulated through negative experiences of regeneration processes: ‘We recommend that a thorough occupier preference analysis is undertaken to gain a systematic understanding of these areas, the findings of which may help to make the public case for regeneration and intensification down the line, as well as informing schemes that may emerge from this process.’46 and later: ‘If confrontation with residents and delays due to dissent are to be avoided, then intense, honest and genuine consultation is needed at the outset of a regeneration programme. One of the problems found in this survey was that local people are naturally distrustful of both developers and local authorities and of consultations that seem to be more cosmetic than real. Developers and Local Authorities need to find ways of fully engaging communities and stakeholders in the project development process, to understand local concerns and build trust. Design workshops, ‘charettes’, enquiry by design and similar techniques of community engagement in early stages are often helpful in creating a positive dialogue and community input. This must be backed up with a genuine intent to deliver a product that is responsive to the intelligence received through this process.’47 To omit these very strong emphases in presenting the research findings underlines the government’s selective use of evidence, and creates a tension between its own position and the stated aim of Complete Streets as a model that strives to achieve ‘social value’ alongside financial viability. How could any regeneration policy succeed when it neglects the specific and complex histories of estates and resident-led narratives of those histories, or reduces understanding of the multiple and complex legacies of Modernism to journalistic clichés? Although the Estate Regeneration Advisory Panel subsequently convened by Lord Heseltine at the government’s request supports ‘locally led’ regeneration and calls for communities to come forward with ‘innovative ideas to achieve desirable neighbourhoods that local people 170

CHAPTER NINE BEN CAMPKIN can be proud of’, in Completing London’s Streets residents’ voices are absent except in the commentaries of a narrow range of industry experts.48 Lord Heseltine’s panel lacks community representatives and sets up a problematic hierarchy between ‘experts’ and the ‘local stakeholders’ with whom they will work.

‘SINK ESTATE’: A BRIEF HISTORY When Cameron evokes the ‘sink estate’ as part of a portrayal of failed welfare state Modernism, what are the connotations? In their study of Modernist hygiene aesthetics, and specifically of the sink in Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye (1929), architectural historians, Nadir Lahiji and Daniel Friedman provide a useful definition of ‘sink’: ‘“Sink” in the verb form means to go down in stages, to fall gradually or drop to a lower level or condition. A “sinking feeling” suggests the weight of great disappointment, discouragement, or depression, as though from a loss of prestige or position. “To sink” means to pass slowly into sleep, despair, lethargy, weakness, or fatigue; or to become dangerously ill, to approach death, to fail or fall. In its transitive construction “to sink” means to cause to descend beneath a surface or to force into the ground; to reduce in quantity or worth; to debase the nature of something, to degrade it, ruin it, defeat it, or plunge it into destruction. First and second meanings of “sink”in its noun form alternate from one dictionary to the next, between “sewer or cesspool” and “any various basins or receptacles connected with a drain pipe and water supply”; most dictionaries offer a third definition, in which “sink” refers to a place regarded as wicked, corrupt, or morally filthy.’49 It is clear how such a wide-ranging concept, like the notion of ‘regeneration’, might have appeal to politicians, policy-makers, journalists and academics. As with regeneration, however, in the case of ‘sink’, the specific trajectories through which the concept has entered and shaped urban debate have been obscured. Although ‘sink’ has become associated with journalistic portrayals of estates, and mainstream political rhetoric in which social housing is deployed as a motif to encapsulate a need for large-scale social change, its origins are in sociological research and architectural criticism of the 1970s. The use of ‘sink’ to describe an estate or an economically deprived area is therefore a relatively recent etymological development. The term was used as an adjective to describe deteriorating conditions before ‘sink estate’ became a noun.50 In 1976, New Society defined the term ‘sink estate’ as ‘the roughest and shabbiest on the books, disproportionately tenanted by families with problems, and despised both by those who live there and the town at large’.51 The term is used in New Society again in 1978 but in a substantive essay reflecting on the arguments about the ‘Making of modern slum estates’. In this article, journalist, social commentator and regular feature writer for New Society Gavin Weightman comments on the rapid decline of certain post-war estates, and again uses ‘sink’ to denote the least popular housing, rejected even by those on the housing waiting list: ‘Before its demise, Noble Street [Newcastle-upon-Tyne] went through a familiar saga of rescue operations, all of which failed to transform it from a “sink” estate into a place which would be in demand from people on the waiting list.’52 ‘Sink estate’, in this account, is equated with ‘ruin’ and ‘slum’, which are also used, as Weightman 171

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES elegiacally, but also analytically, evokes the semi-deserted wasteground of a council estate returning to nature at just 20 years old. The essay is notable for its balance, being critical of both left radical and conservative architectural determinist ‘quick and easy explanations’ for degradation.53 As a process of decline, according to Weightman, sink is caused in part by highly particular local issues, including the availability of better housing, which decreases demand for certain relatively new estates. He engages with the nuances of debates about architectural determinism as others engaged with decline. Weightman contends that in spite of how bad it looks, it is wrong to see places like Noble Street as ‘simply a design failure’, and notes instances where decline has been successfully reversed, giving the example of local students and other single professionals renting flats on otherwise hard-to-let estates.54 He goes on to dismiss the determinist association of high-rise and sink, critiquing Oscar Newman’s ‘defensible space’ approach through reference to a review of the literature on ‘problem council estates’ carried out by the Building Research Station for the Department of the Environment.55 Weightman ends his article with a warning: ‘It may be unlikely, but if demolition were to become a popular solution to the problem of “sink” estates, the same mistake as was made with the clearance of nineteenth-century “slums” could be repeated. Many of those terraces may have looked bad from the train into Newcastle, but inside houses, branded as slums, could be spick and span.’56 Demolition has not, in 2016, become a popular solution with residents, but it is both revealing and disturbing to read this sentence now, when estate regeneration strategy so often favours demolition, even when the evidence for it is contested.57 This and a second article by Weightman raise a general problem for journalists (and academic commentators) writing about urban decline. While Weightman strives to provide thorough and balanced social and architectural criticism, and to critique the vague ‘impressions’ through which estate reputations are informed – or misinformed – through racialised or other constructs, at the same time he revels in descriptions of degraded environments (‘a grey fortress in a scrubby landscape’ at Hulme Crescents).58 But in this writing there is a self-reflexive attention to the power of language to contribute to decline, and a clear emphasis on demystifying the negative language and aesthetic value judgments being deployed, as when he notes that ‘it’s hard to separate out image and reality in Moss Side and Hulme’ in the apocryphal stories of decay, infestation and so on.59 There is also an explicit case being made for more rigorous sociological research to understand complex environments. For Weightman, knowledge about estates has to come about by giving voice to residents themselves, here through an informal ethnographic approach, in keeping with New Society’s wider interests in privileging under-represented voices.60 He draws attention to the fact that Hulme Crescents is strategically deployed as a symbol of decline simultaneously in left and right propaganda, in texts that ‘shriek’.61 In keeping with the magazine as a whole, Weightman’s approach is not to be news-led but rather to pause critically and evaluate the specific situation in its complexity.62 That New Society was an important conduit for the dissemination of strong empirical research on housing is also clear from articles such as Michael Young’s ‘Never go out after dark’ (1981) in which he reported findings from an Institute of Community Studies survey of 929 people 172

CHAPTER NINE BEN CAMPKIN surveyed about housing in Hackney. Young reports on the findings of these interviews, which highlight the nuanced ways that the management and design of housing interact with demographic factors to influence perceptions of danger or safety. Once again, it is emphasised that this is clearly not a simple matter of design, and once again the article suggests productive ways of addressing the challenges identified by residents, such as through the reintroduction of in situ caretakers who had by the early 1980s been withdrawn as part of the Conservative government’s spending cuts.63 New Society’s commitment to in-depth, accessible coverage of housing issues is also demonstrated by one-off pamphlets such as A Guide to the Housing Finance Act (1972), published with the main magazine and cheaply available for independent distribution.64 The term ‘sink estate’ also appeared in academic discourse in the context of sociology and specifically ‘radical deviancy’ theory of the 1970s, and in attempts by sociologists to understand violence in working-class youth cultures through the use of participatory approaches focused on instigating social change.65 In London, it also featured in New Society’s coverage of the aftermath of the Broadwater Farm riot on the Broadwater Farm Estate, Tottenham, in 1985. Writing in 1987, Steve Platt rejected the idea that this was ‘the crime-ridden sink estate of popular mythology’, drawing attention to the problematically negative and imprecise operation of the sink estate imaginary. He highlighted, in response, the lack of vandalism and graffiti, drug abuse and petty crime and instead emphasised the range of community-led initiatives. Again using ethnographic methods he comments that black and white, young and old residents and the Broadwater Farm Defence Campaign all repeatedly reinforced the point that they understood the riot as an ‘uprising’, a reaction to years of racist policing, as well as a response to Cynthia Jarrett’s death while her home was being searched by police. For Till, in the debate with Hillier referred to above, Broadwater Farm following the riots is a key site in which a range of authors developed determinist arguments that degraded estates ‘result’ in riots.66 This event marked a turning point, further polarising debates about post-war Modernist estates. Another early use of the term, in 1981, features in an article on ‘The New Right and Architectural Aesthetics’, in History Workshop Journal. This report of a professional forum of architects and historians demonstrates that even those who were contesting conservative approaches to architectural aesthetics – lately put forward by Roger Scruton in The Aesthetics of Architecture (1979), and David Watkin in Morality and Architecture (1977) – and intent on countering such texts with ‘proper left analysis’, saw no problem in using the term.67 However, the usage here emphasised sink as reversible, with a need to give ‘new substance to the issue of a practical aesthetics of architecture by suggesting that it should address itself to such questions as how to rehabilitate a sink estate so people would actually want to come and live in it’.68 The phrase ‘sink estate’ had not yet stagnated into a classification that was stigmatising, conflating residual material conditions with people to an extent that exceeded its analytical value for describing processes of decline. The article reports on an ‘Art and Society History Workshop’ held at the Bartlett School of Architecture in May 1981, its purpose ‘to engage in a critique of a new right tendency in recent architectural writing’, which ‘combines a denunciation of Modernism with a call for the return to a classicising aesthetic in which the social dimension can be completely ignored’.69 Aligning himself 173

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES with this position, in response Potts critiques the ‘commonsense notion of value that can only seem to be natural because it is one of the shared values of the upper middle class minority’.70 The proponents of this critique called for more rigour in the use of history in housing and architectural discourse, critiquing the ‘pseudo-history’, ‘anti-history’ and ‘lack of historical understanding’ that feature in the writings of Modernism’s supporters and its detractors (the new architectural moralists). They also commented on the way in which, in debates about Modernism, class-based value judgments are imposed through an insistence on certain architectural aesthetics. These all seem very relevant critiques for discourse about post-war estates in the present day, and in particular the way that ‘traditional urbanism’ and ‘attractive’ housing are invoked as if these categories were universally understood and agreed to be desirable.

SINK AND RESIDUUM: MORAL DISCOURSES ON THE OUT OF SYNC There are echoes, then, of these early 1980s conversations in the discourses of the present day. In current debate, out-of-sync evidence (such as that from earlier phases of environmental determinism) is recycled or used out of context, while the more rigorous and mixed-methods approach to ethnographic and architectural historical research exemplified in New Society seems to be lacking in the kinds of research that are privileged by the media as it feeds on clichés.71 In many ways the arguments and rhetoric seem diminished in their ability to understand and present knowledge about estates which have, in the intervening period, accrued further complexity as historical objects still very much in use and transition. That the emblematic estates that are the object of attention now are consistent with the cases discussed in the 1970s and 1980s instils a further sense of repetition. The idea of sink, via the notion of residuality, highlights a much longer historical trajectory through which contemporary housing discourse must be understood. It links back to the nineteenth-century concept of ‘the residuum’ described by the social historian Gareth Stedman Jones: ‘Pitted against the dominant climate of moral and material improvement however was a minority of the still unregenerate poor: those who had turned their backs on progress, or had been rejected by it. This group was variously referred to as “the dangerous class,” the casual poor or most characteristically, as “the residuum”. After two and a half decades of rapid economic growth and an apparently substantial rise in the working class standard of living, chronic poverty was no longer thought of as the inevitable lot of the great majority of mankind, but rather as a residual enclave to be eradicated by progress. In the explanation of the existence of the residuum the subjective psychological defects of individuals bulked even larger than before. [The influential economist Alfred] Marshall expressed the prevailing opinion when he characterized the “residuum” as “those who have a poor physique and a weak character – those who are limp in body and mind”. The problem was not structural but moral. The evil to be combated was not poverty but pauperism: pauperism with its attendant vices, drunkenness, improvidence, mendicancy, bad language, filthy habits, gambling, low amusements, and ignorance.’72 This account reminds us of the origins of regeneration and degeneration as components of a moral discourse in which the weak bodies and characters of the poorest in society are merged with states of urban decline. Stedman Jones emphasises that the problem of the residuum was of 174

CHAPTER NINE BEN CAMPKIN a latent threat to the social order, a ‘disquieting alien presence’ who inhabited ‘cities within cities’ – the same crowd who were understood by writers such as Engels to strike fear into the hearts of the powers that be, because of their potential to take coordinated action.73 Furthermore, the theory of ‘degeneration’, generally supported by the middle classes in the 1880s and 1890s, understood the threat of decline (moral and physical, such as stunted growth) as hereditary and worsening with every urban generation.74 Building on Stedman Jones, Geoffrey Crossick notes how the political economy of the nineteenth-century capitalist city coexisted with the social hierarchies established in the eighteenth century; yet he is critical of Stedman Jones’ analysis for a tendency to submerge ambiguities of meaning into a fixed structure, whereas ‘the new ideas and perceptions expressed in unchanging language need stressing just as much as do the older ideas expressed through new language’.75 He also notes that Victorian vocabularies for class were closely linked to housing typologies, and that these linguistic-spatial classifications ‘powerfully shaped perceptions’ of distinct social groups, including the instance of the residuum established in commentaries of the 1880s.76 The residuum, like ‘sink’, which is used to refer to both estates and communities, was used by a range of commentators, including those who set out to address social problems rather than reinforce existing hierarchies and divisions. This term was of equivalent legibility to sink, equated with ‘the low’, in terms of the spatial stratification of class. And it was equally malleable, able to be politically manipulated through its imprecisions.

SINKS: OUT-OF-SYNC POTENTIAL The ‘sink estate’, as it has appeared in recent discourse, is on many levels a problematic metaphor. As Forty has commented, ‘metaphors are experiments with the possible likeness of unlike things’.77 In the case of ‘sink’, the original analytic nuance of the notion has been lost. As with anxieties about the residuum, with the urban disorder of 2011 as the backdrop, the latent threat of the sink estate, in Cameron’s article, ‘is just how cut-off, self-governing and divorced from the mainstream these communities can become’.78 This perceived threat, at a time when the apparatus of governance is shifting to private companies, points to a sense of sink as potential, more akin to Engels’ analysis of the possible revolutionary action of the crowd. In this context, environmental theorist Jennifer Gabrys’ metabolic conceptualisation of sink is pertinent. Gabrys examines sinks as they feature in the physical sciences to refer to ‘spaces and processes that capture and channel wastes’.79 She emphasises these spaces – from our bodies to sewers and wastegrounds – as ecologically vital for the processing and transformation of wastes. In this rendering sink refers to iterative and creative processes of reconfiguration, and contests the overly neat concept of environmental equilibrium, or an urban world understandable through the inheritances of Modernist notions of order and disorder, and manageable through erasing the past and prioritising the new. These spaces and processes are ‘less about balance and more about continual change and exchange’, ‘indeterminate hybrids of waste, technology, ecology, humans and non-humans’.80 They are, in short, out of sync. In spite of the term’s circulation and its negative connotations, we might suggest – drawing on the recent conceptualisation of environmental sinks in science and technology studies – that ‘sink’ can be repurposed, or purposefully misread, towards a conception of positive social and environmental potentiality, where to be out of sync with the present, but meaningfully in touch 175

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES with a constellation of historical reference points, can be a desirable, critically productive and regenerative method of sustaining communities, resisting politically motivated eviction and demolition processes, and flattened, linear or reductive historical narratives.81 ‘Sink’ in this sense captures ‘the now’ this essay began with, in that it points to productive methods of assembling historical material within contemporary contexts, drawing attention to and disrupting the short-termist, cyclical qualities of policy-making that neglects or denies history and uses evidence opportunistically.

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CHAPTER TEN RECENT APPROACHES TO THE SUSTAINABLE RETROFIT OF VICTORIAN HOUSES SOFIE PELSMAKERS AND DAVID KROLL

Sustainable retrofit has received considerable policy and media attention in recent years. The urgent need to improve the energy-efficiency of existing housing has been widely acknowledged and is part of the UK and EU agenda to reduce CO2 emissions.1 Victorian and pre-1919 houses in general make up a large share of the existing housing stock in the UK. Their retrofit therefore plays a key role in achieving these energy-efficiency targets. This chapter discusses recent approaches to the retrofit of Victorian houses in order to understand better their architectural implications and ambitions. As Andrew Saint suggests in this book’s Preface, adaptations range from some who ’slosh white on every surface’ to others who ‘cherish every mantelpiece and mousehole’. The chapter is interested in the shades between these extremes and what drives and defines them. We identified certain key approaches among recent retrofit projects, grouping these under sub-headings (at times borrowing from established terms in heritage theory): ‘new meets old’, ‘new matches old’, ‘layers of change’, ‘living retrofit’ and ‘radical transformations’. The terminology emerged out of the kinds of projects we found, and we then illustrated each of these approaches by discussing projects that we see as exemplary. Most of these case studies are located in London; some are in other parts of the UK, for which it was difficult to find an equivalent London example. We found this stocktaking exercise valuable as it relates to our own work in design teaching and practice; most retrofit projects that we have been involved with can be linked to at least one of these approaches.

INTRODUCTION Overall, the examples show that Victorian houses – despite their challenges – are well placed to enable significant alterations, as they have done in the past. The projects discussed illustrate that energy-efficiency and thermal-comfort retrofits need not be incompatible with valuing heritage and other social and architectural considerations. This contribution is different from others in this book in that the case-study projects have taken place in just the last few years – in the very recent past. However, in dealing with Victorian built heritage, it also presents a link to the more distant past. To allay the possibility of disappointed expectations, it should also be pointed out that this chapter is not a manual on how to do good retrofit, and it is certainly not a technical guide. This is instead a brief but systematic overview of key recent retrofit approaches that others might draw 177

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES on and be inspired by. While not supplying technical guidance, our contribution does try to cross boundaries of specialisations that do not in practice always talk to each other. We do therefore discuss technical and environmental aspects, as well as make links to heritage and architectural theory. There are a number of reasons for focusing exclusively on approaches to altering Victorian houses in this chapter.2 This housing age group consists of nearly 30% of the UK’s housing stock.3 Furthermore, its energy performance is generally worse than that of newer buildings.4 Finally, there are particular challenges and tensions that arise between heritage and energy-efficiency considerations when upgrading these buildings. The purpose of this chapter is to contribute to a discussion of such issues to ensure the enduring legacy of Victorian houses. So why is it so important to retrofit the houses in the first place? The UK’s 27 million existing dwellings contribute nearly a third of the UK’s CO2 emissions – hence the UK and other European governments’ ambitious targets for CO2 reductions over the next decades.5 Governments are seeking to reduce carbon emissions from the existing building stock by 80–90% through deep retrofits,6 requiring sustainable retrofitting of the existing building stock at an unprecedented scale. This will be generally more resource- and energy-efficient than the alternative of demolition and re-build.7 Furthermore, the present rate of demolition is only about 0.1%, and 70–85% of our buildings will still be in use in 2050.8 This is why, every year, around 800,000 dwellings will need to be upgraded to achieve the aforementioned carbon reduction targets by 2050. In practical terms, it means upgrading at least one building every minute for the next 35 years to ambitious standards. These targets are especially challenging for the UK as it has one of the oldest and least efficient housing stocks in the developed world: about 4.9 million dwellings were built pre-1919 in England and 6.6 million in the UK.9 Generally, pre-1919 dwellings are of solid walled construction with larger than average dwelling floor areas and are estimated to have a need for about 40% more heating on average than dwellings built since 1990.10 Hence a considered approach is required for a large-scale upgrade of Victorian houses to contribute to climate change mitigation, while leaving the stock robust for future adaptations. Additionally, buildings should only be upgraded once in this timescale for resource and energy-efficiency reasons. As such, the adoption of high energy-efficiency standards in current building upgrades is necessary to avoid the need for future retrofit work and its associated costs and disruption. Simultaneously, these buildings will need to continue to provide shelter in a changing climate: hotter and drier summers are predicted, while slightly milder and wetter winters (leading to increased flash-flooding risks) might become the norm. London and south-east England will be especially subject to increasingly hot summers and longer heat waves (further exacerbating London’s ‘urban heat island’ effect), for which our new and existing buildings are ill-designed. Although energy-efficiency needs to be improved, there are also many lessons to be learnt from Victorian houses in terms of sustainability and durability. For instance, typical Victorian terraced housing achieves a compact urban form – enabling good pedestrian and public transport connections – while at the same time providing gardens and suiting the single occupancy of a house to which many aspire.11 Internal timber floors and partition walls have made it fairly easy to make internal alterations and adapt and subdivide houses. Furthermore, tall windows and high ceilings bring natural daylight into an otherwise deep and efficient floor plan and – depending on 178

CHAPTER TEN SOFIE PELSMAKERS, DAVID KROLL orientation – maximise desirable free solar energy gains in winter. Where there are bay windows, they overcome the limited exposure to different orientations to provide daylight and sunlight from multiple directions. In some houses, wooden shutters help reduce night-time heat loss, provide additional security and privacy and, if needed, act as internal summer solar shading. The typical sash windows are excellent mechanisms for rapid ventilation for summer cooling, including the possibility of secure night-time cooling with (partially) closed but secured shutters. Additionally, the solid external brick walls have proven to be very durable and their high thermal capacity helps balance solar gains in summer (also aided by the presence of high ceilings). All of these are qualities that support durability and sustainability, and which are often missing in new-build dwellings. These will remain of continuous benefit in a future warming world if the brick walls are left uninsulated internally, ceiling heights are maintained, and window and shutter mechanisms are replaced with similar. Victorian houses have also been extremely robust in enabling significant alterations over the decades and centuries, which has only added to their longevity and desirability. For example, in the late twentieth century, fireplaces were largely retained for aesthetic and decorative reasons, even though their heating function had been replaced by central heating systems (typically gas-fuelled boilers and a network of radiators and hot-water pipework). The same fossil fuelpowered boilers also now supply hot water to internal bathing areas. Moreover, sculleries were generally replaced by modern kitchens with electrical appliances, electrical lighting and sockets; and toilets – often located in the yard in the nineteenth century – were placed inside the warm, thermal envelope.12 These significant alterations, made gradually over the course of the building’s lifetime, were considered necessary and accepted by users, architects and conservation professionals, given changing expectations and use over time. Despite these qualities, the heat-leaking building envelope (wall, roof, windows and floors) of Victorian houses is highly inefficient in the context of contemporary use patterns and expectations. The original sash windows, for example, were designed to provide fresh air to an interior heated with oxygen-consuming fireplaces. When used with modern central heating, however, these leaky windows are no longer necessary and instead contribute to significant heat loss and discomfort. With 20% of heat lost through windows and doors and about 10% from unwanted air leakage and draughts through gaps and cracks in the building fabric, many occupants have replaced these leaky windows with better fitting double-glazed windows.13 Heat loss through roofs (about 25%) is also significant and most lofts have been insulated, though Victorian houses have the lowest insulation levels compared to more recently built dwellings.14 The necessary reduction in energy use at the scale required, however, means that the energyefficiency upgrade of Victorian houses needs to go further and would also need to tackle heatlosses through the solid brick walls (about 35%) and through the suspended timber ground floors (about 10%) alongside further airtightness measures to reduce unwanted draughts.15 Recently, researchers such as Baker, Li and Rhee-Duverne found that solid brick walls performed better than assumed: conductive heat loss through several walls was found to be 20–30% better than typically assumed.16 However, even with improved performance, wall heat loss is still significant and about five to six times higher than allowed by current (2015) Building Regulations in England for new build dwellings and as recommended for upgrades to existing.

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MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES Similarly, as in the past, Victorian houses will need to be significantly altered – this time to reduce excessive energy use and ever increasing energy costs – to meet different modern thermal comfort expectations. However, significant alterations to reduce energy use and associated carbon emissions (and to ensure living in a Victorian house remains affordable and comfortable) are often viewed as difficult to reconcile with the heritage qualities of houses, even if they are not listed buildings.17 This drive to tackle the issue of energy (less so the associated heritage implications) is reflected in a number of inspiring retrofit projects – for example the UK government’s pilot projects ‘Retrofit for the Future’ – as well as in an emerging body of literature about these case studies and sustainable retrofit in general. A notable example is Marion Baeli’s review of 20 residential case studies, though much of the content focuses on technical aspects and the feasibility of achieving large CO2 emission reductions in existing dwellings.18 Others also include or focus on the implication of this challenge for heritage, for example Fouseki and English Heritage.19 Heritage significance assessments have been developed, for example the EFFESUS Methodology.20 Literature about the social implications of large-scale sustainable retrofit is less forthcoming, though there is more available on related discussions around the social implications of the modernisation of existing buildings instead of demolition.21 A number of authors in this book touch on this topic in particular in relation to post-war housing (see, for example, David Roberts’ chapter). Given the urgency, scale and ambition of the UK’s carbon reduction targets, energy-efficiency should be of the highest priority when upgrading buildings. There are examples where this means that building retrofit designs and specifications are determined first by their energy-conservation potential, and heritage conservation values come second. Indeed, it could be argued that energy-efficiency upgrades inherently protect our heritage over time by adapting the buildings to be fit for future use. Furthermore, unless energy use and associated carbon emissions of buildings are significantly reduced, much of the heritage we value is likely to be threatened by the effects of climate change such as flooding, or the increasing costs of maintaining thermal comfort. An ‘energy-efficiency first’ approach to retrofit can therefore help to protect and conserve the building and its use now and in the future. An example of a particularly ambitious ‘Retrofit for the Future’ project in terms of energyefficiency is one undertaken by London and Quadrant housing in Fortunegate Road, Brent (Figure 10.1). Predicted energy reductions of 86% were achieved mainly by improved airtightness, increased fabric insulation throughout, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery (MVHR) and by replacing sash windows with tilt-and-turn triple-glazed windows.22 The house was not listed or in a conservation area and the existing brick walls on the front facade were externally insulated with a white rendered finish on the bay walls and extended party walls and timber cladding elsewhere. This externally added insulation in a terraced house means that the front elevation walls now stand proud of the uninsulated neighbouring walls. The covering up of the street facade was seen as a necessary compromise to achieve a deep retrofit at reduced costs and disruption to residents, who continued living in the house during the works. The heritage impact, however, is significant: the original Victorian house with bay window is almost unrecognisable. Baeli explains that ‘while the street-scape is undoubtedly affected, the change was deemed acceptable by the client given 180

CHAPTER TEN SOFIE PELSMAKERS, DAVID KROLL the radical improvement in energy performance of the property.’23 A danger of such an approach is that it can alienate different stakeholders and homeowners and give the impression that significant heritage sacrifices are a necessary consequence of achieving energy and carbon emission reductions – that both cannot co-exist. An easy misconception could be that a ‘do-nothing’ (or ‘do as little as possible’) approach to energyefficiency is the only route to prioritising heritage values. Yet doing nothing would create missed opportunities, both in terms of necessary carbon emission reductions and also in terms of occupant thermal comfort and affordability. As Fouseki notes, ‘it is this delicate balance between human comfort, cost-effective energy technologies, and heritage preservation that needs to be achieved and this only may be feasible if there is willingness for dialogue, compromise, and negotiation among different professions.’24 Combining deep retrofit with a respect for heritage is an important challenge; retrofitted buildings should not need to become unrecognisable or undesirable to achieve exemplary energy performance. The following modernisation and extension projects exemplify approaches to retrofitting that consider architectural and heritage issues in different ways.

NEW MEETS OLD

FIGURE 10.1, ABOVE, TOP Deep retrofit of a Victorian terrace house in Fortunegate Road, Brent, with external wall insulation applied, significantly altering the house and the street. FIGURE 10.2, ABOVE, BOTTOM Mapledene Road, Hackney. The extension in frameless glazing is a modern and contrasting addition to the existing facade.

The market for modernisations and extensions of older houses has been flourishing in London in recent years, supported by gains in property values and by the introduction of extended permitted development rules in 2013, which has made planning permissions for extensions significantly more straightforward.25 The architecturally more ambitious examples of these alteration projects often take an approach to retrofit which could be described as ‘new meets old’. The approach is based on the premise that any new additions, including the internal alterations, should be modern and contrast with the older existing building, rather than try to match its style and architectural language. Key architectural awards for notable retrofit and extension projects are the ‘AJ Retrofit Awards’, as well as ‘Don’t Move, Improve!’, held yearly by New London Architecture (NLA) since 2009, which recognises projects that ‘radically rethink the homes’.26 Many of the shortlisted submissions are examples of this ‘new meets old’ approach. A case in point is the retrofit and extension in Mapledene Road, 181

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES Hackney, by Platform5 Architects, which won the award in its first year (Figure 10.2). The extension in frameless glazing is a celebration of the possibilities of glass as a modern material in contrast to the solidity of the traditional brickwork of the existing building. This approach of contrasting new and old has roots in early twentieth-century Modernism and its desire to distinguish itself from architecture of the past, and it is also linked to the debate about restoration. In the nineteenth century, a popular approach to restoration was to try to ‘recreate’ the old building and for new work to match its style.27 The shift in how Modernist architects approached built heritage is reflected in the Venice Charter of 1966, which suggests that new additions to historic buildings should not try to match or imitate the existing, but be visibly different. This underlying principle comes across in several sections of the charter, for example in Article 9: ‘The process of restoration … must stop at the point where conjecture begins, and in this case moreover any extra work which is indispensable must be distinct from the architectural composition and must bear a contemporary stamp.’28 The charter reflects Modernist thinking of the time, which stressed the value of ‘honest’ design and rejected any form of imitation of past styles. The foundations for these ideas, however, go back further than early Modernists such as Le Corbusier, and can be traced in particular to Ruskin, who was at the same time influential in creating awareness of the value of historic buildings and conservation. Along with Arts and Crafts thinkers, he railed against the ‘dishonest’ imitation apparent in much Italianate Victorian mass housing. He supported conservation of existing buildings but was against restoration that attempted to rebuild and recreate – and therefore falsify – the past.29 This argument has been widely accepted since, and guides many approaches to retrofit and conservation today.30 An important aspect of retrofit is that it makes buildings desirable to live in, to meet residents’ needs that have changed dramatically from those of the Victorians who built the houses. Without this kind of modernisation, the houses would become undesirable and unliveable. Given a choice, very few people would be willing to live in houses without modern sanitary, electrical or central heating upgrades, for example. In order to cater for today’s needs, many original features of most pre-1919 houses, such as kitchen or bathroom fittings have already been replaced. Spatially, open-plan kitchens have replaced separate sculleries to the rear, and internal bathrooms have replaced outhouses. Original features like wooden shutters, heavy curtains, timber panelling and rugs, which also acted as thermal devices, have often already been stripped away. Instead, light-coloured walls and timber floorboards have become a widely accepted default of twenty-first century living in London. In order to conserve old houses, adaptation is a necessary part of their continued lifespan. A ‘new meets old’ approach can help to revive and update old buildings to contemporary tastes and needs. Most of the projects presented in the ‘Don’t Move, Improve!’ awards include improvements to the building’s energy performance at least in line with Building Regulations. Yet the ambitions of these fabric upgrades are often insufficient to meet our climate change mitigation obligations. In light of the carbon reduction challenge ahead, approaches to retrofit that prioritise a certain aesthetic over energy-efficiency seem problematic. The aforementioned Mapledene Road 182

CHAPTER TEN SOFIE PELSMAKERS, DAVID KROLL project, for example, appealing as its Modernist aesthetic of maximum transparency may be, seems questionable in terms of energy-efficiency due to its large areas of frameless glazing. An interesting and exemplary case study in terms of energy-efficiency is the 80% House by Venner Lucas architects in a conservation area in Cornford Grove, Balham, South London (Figure 10.3).31 The added energy saving measures and extensions are clearly separate and visible, but they are also very subtle in the way they are integrated with the existing measures. Energy use and bills were reduced by two-thirds, leading to associated carbon emission reductions of about 65%. These savings were mainly achieved by extensive insulation of walls, floor and roof, draughtproofing measures and upgrading single-glazed sash windows with either new triple-glazed sash windows (on the rear elevation) or refurbished existing sash windows with double-glazed panes (front facade). Of particular interest is the choice of cork insulation for both internal and external wall application. The architect’s experimental approach to the external cork wall insulation (which is left exposed here – normally it is rendered) is clearly contemporary and distinct from the existing London stock brick. Regularly placed timber battens also enable climbing plants to be supported. This case study illustrates that contemporary yet sensitive architectural approaches can be combined when undertaking deep retrofits.

NEW MATCHES OLD A common approach to retrofit is to match the existing building as closely as possible, rather than to contrast the new and the old. It is often used if the retrofit does not involve any extensions and if the building is in a conservation area or listed. This approach to retrofit is less popular among contemporary architects who generally prefer to create something distinguishably new rather than imitate what is already there.32 There are, however, proponents of the approach of ‘new matching the old’ in the architectural community. Robert Adam, for example, advocates continuity rather than contrast. He questions whether it matters when new parts and additions are mistaken for part of the original by a casual visitor. He suggests that ‘history was not all revolutions. There is a tradition of literate continuity which is just as authentic as glaring contrast.’33 As a patron of traditional architectural design in the UK, another proponent of such an approach is Prince Charles, who describes modern additions and alterations to historic buildings as an ‘intrusion’.34 Instead he proposes an approach that emphasises a ‘concept of harmony’ between old and new. In relation to retrofitted nineteenth-century houses, one should bear in mind that most are no longer actually in their original condition, even if they may appear like it. Their spatial configuration and building services at least are usually already updated and modernised to a degree. There is therefore also a question of whether conservation is only about maintaining the physical appearance of a building that has already changed in many other regards. What is to be conserved: the old or the previously renewed old? What this section illustrates, however, is that a diversity of approaches exists and that these have been applied in sustainable retrofit. The owner’s preference may be for a sustainable retrofit that recreates the impression of an unchanged ‘old’ building. In listed buildings, this approach is often expected from heritage bodies, and examples of successful deep sustainable retrofit in listed buildings do exist – for example a retrofit by Arboreal Architecture in Clapham (Figure 10.4). The building was upgraded 183

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES to AECB Silver standard (reducing space-heating energy by about 75%), principally by introducing double-glazed secondary glazing, significantly improved airtightness, and internal insulation to walls, roof and floor – but without mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, due to incompatibility of ductwork with historic features.35 Both this project and that by Venner Lucas won several awards and there is much to be learned. It should, however, also be noted that this project had an extensive budget beyond the means of many Londoners. Being sensitive to heritage (whether through choice or stipulation) usually also involves the conservation of the external facade. In energy-efficient retrofit, this means that internal wall insulation is typically applied instead of facadealtering external wall insulation. In deep retrofits a significant amount of insulation needs to be added, often more than 150mm (depending on the thermal performance of the insulation). This results in some loss of space internally and can increase the risk of interstitial condensation. Such risks can, however, be minimised by careful detailing and by specifying appropriate insulation materials and finishes, as well as by monitoring performance.36 For instance, in the exemplary Clapham project, the architects specified nine different insulation materials to respond ‘directly to localised historic fabric and performance requirements’; certain areas of the building fabric were monitored with wireless sensors – both before and after the insulation was installed.37 The insulation strategy in the 170 year-old house was to maintain vapour permeability so that the construction could dry both inwards and outwards. Alongside extensive wireless monitoring, the insulation choices helped to reduce and manage moisture issues and occupant comfort. According to Harry Paticas of Arboreal Architecture, ‘through the use of the passivhaus software PHPP, the designed energy savings accurately predicted the actual savings.’38 Another exemplary deep retrofit scheme – also in a conservation area – is ‘Brent 1’ by bere:architects (Figure 10.5). The Victorian semi-detached house was improved throughout to near passivhaus standard by a combination of upgrading existing sash windows, extensive fabric insulation and draught proofing throughout. These measures are estimated to have led to 88% reduction in space-heating energy and more than 75% CO2 reductions.39 The architects also conducted masonry 184

CHAPTER TEN SOFIE PELSMAKERS, DAVID KROLL permeability tests prior to installing internal wall insulation to the front facade.40 The side and rear facades were treated with 100mm insulation with rendered finish, although this was only permitted after a planning appeal. Overall, these projects illustrate that with careful design solutions, specification and consideration, the tension between heritage concerns and energy-efficiency improvements can be addressed and negotiated.

LAYERS OF CHANGE Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn has been an important reference for the design of retrofit and adaptations of existing buildings.41 In particular, the idea of ‘Shearing Layers of Change’ – which Brand adopted and developed further from Frank Duffy – had an influence on how architects think about retrofit.42 The Shearing Layers concept distinguishes between Site, Structure, Skin, Services, Space Plan and Stuff. Each of these has different timespans of how often change occurs – Site being the most permanent, Stuff the most transient. The structure of many Victorian houses, for example, has been unaltered for over a century, but the Skin, Services, Space Plan and Stuff have usually already undergone significant changes.

FIGURE 10.3 A AND B, OPPOSITE 80% House by Venner Lucas Architects in a conservation area in Balham. Externally insulated wall with exposed cork, contemporary and distinct from the existing London stock brick. FIGURES 10.4 A AND B, ABOVE , TOP Retrofit of a listed building in Clapham by Arboreal Architecture. The retrofit measures, such as the secondary glazing, are not obvious at first glance; the original interior mouldings were retained but the walls are painted in a modern white with a new timber floor finish. FIGURES 10.5 A AND B, ABOVE, BOTTOM Deep retrofit by bere:architects in Dyne Road, Brent, with externally insulated rear facade.

Brand points out the obvious fact (yet one that is often overlooked by the design profession): that most buildings in daily use are not museum pieces but are in a state of constant change. Certain parts have a long lifespan, while others – such as furniture and wall finishes – can change every few years. It would be futile to try to keep them permanently in one state, but it is instead important to acknowledge change as part of their use. Brand’s idea can be seen as part of a wider dialogue in conservation theory where the focus has shifted from the preservation or recreation of one assumed original state (which is often hard to define) to recognising the benefit and necessity of change, and the desirability of preserving layers of this change as an integral part of heritage.43 Pamela Jerome describes this concept as ‘progressive authenticities’, which describes ‘the legitimacy of layered authenticity, evoking successive adaptations of historic places over time’.44 There are a number of recent retrofit projects which reflect this change in approach. In relation to the retrofit of Victorian housing in London, the ‘House of Trace’, which was designed by Tsuruta Architects and won the 2016 ‘Don’t Move, Improve!’ 185

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES Award, is a good example (Figure 10.6). The project description by the architects reflects this desire to create an extension and retrofit that incorporates elements of its past and is also open to future change: they describe the project as an ‘intervention that can be a part of the original main building without replicating classical vocabulary or gesture. Our intent was to keep a sense of everyday memory, while simultaneously allowing the new intervention to have its own identity.’45 In terms of its environmental performance, the design manages to retain good daylighting although the rear extension takes up the full width of the site. The House of Trace was not a deep retrofit but was refurbished to building regulations standards, in itself an improvement from the unrefurbished house. Even so, the energy-efficiency did not go as far as it could have. The House of Trace demonstrates that modern and traditional do not always have to be contradictions but can coexist, and that these layers of the building’s history can be made visible in the retrofit and add to its quality.

LIVING RETROFIT

FIGURE 10.6, ABOVE ‘House of Trace,’ Whatman Road, Forest Hill, by Tsuruta Architects. 186

Conservation theory and practice have shifted from focusing on the ‘hard’ aspects – the physical appearance of the building – to greater consideration of the ‘soft’ aspects, the life that takes place in buildings. The Australian Burra Charter of 1981 made a significant contribution to this discussion by introducing the importance of ‘place’ and cultural heritage to conservation practices. The Burra Charter advocated a cautious approach to change which may also be appropriate when dealing with the heritage of Victorian houses: ‘do as much as necessary to care for the place and to make it useable, but otherwise change it as little as possible so that its cultural significance is retained.’46 This concept was expanded on in the Nara Charter (1994), which also reaffirmed the notion of ‘progressive authenticities’.47 In conservation, this broadened consideration of ‘living cultures’ or ‘living heritage’ also constituted a shift in focus from the physical appearance of the building to give more consideration to non-physical, living aspects – cultural and social ones for example – essential to the lives of those occupying the buildings and other stakeholders.48 This concept can also be applied to retrofit projects as they are ultimately about those who live in them and near them; sustainable retrofit is not only about making buildings airtight and energy efficient, but also about how it can generally serve its target user group and local community.

CHAPTER TEN SOFIE PELSMAKERS, DAVID KROLL For one thing, the energy performance is dependent on occupant behaviour. Furthermore, every retrofit project, even as small as a private house, also has cultural and social significance. It is part of a living history and can make a difference to the local area and community. The relevance of these ‘soft’ aspects of retrofit is particularly apparent in Assemble’s Turner Prize-winning and widelypraised Granby project in Liverpool (Figure 10.7).49 It is a good example of a project in which the physical characteristics of the buildings by themselves did not determine the value of the architecture. The buildings were seen as an obstacle to future progress in the area and to its regeneration; condemned to demolition, they only survived due to the persistence of some of the residents, who refused to sell their houses, even when much of the neighbourhood had already been boarded up for demolition. Through lobbying and activism over decades, which involved the planting of greenery in the area and organising street events, the voices of the residents were finally heard. In 2011, they began the restoration of ten of the houses with support from the local council and Assemble as architectural consultants. One of the most remarkable aspects of the process of restoring and retrofitting the houses was the unconventional design process of Assemble. The houses became part of a Community Land Trust and were restored with the help of the residents themselves as affordable housing. Rather than focusing on a finished overall solution, Assemble collaborated with the residents to develop designs of a number of crucial fittings needed for the houses, including chimney surrounds, lampshades, doorknobs, stools, tables and wall-tiles. A lot of these fittings had been removed from the houses in anticipation of their demolition. They were therefore a crucial starting point that facilitated regeneration of the houses. The items are still produced by residents and can be purchased to support the Granby project.

FIGURE 10.7, ABOVE Drawing of Granby Four Streets, Liverpool.

With the celebration in the architectural media of polished, luxury retrofits in London, the social issues that they also reflect are often disregarded. Housing has become an asset, which is worth updating decoratively and extending for financial reasons. Energy conservation is generally not considered a priority, given that assets increase regardless of such improvements. The current housing shortage in London does 187

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES raise the question of whether affordability and housing shortage issues might also be addressed in how retrofit is approached; for example, underused old warehouse and office buildings could be allowed to be redeveloped by housing associations, co-housing groups or Community Land Trusts for retrofit projects to construct affordable housing. Such projects have been very successful in Amsterdam, for example, as self-build retrofits.50 In relation to larger-scale deep retrofits, it is important to modernise buildings without displacing those of low incomes. This is especially relevant given that low-income households will benefit most from reduced energy bills, yet are least likely to be able to afford such measures. The piecemeal government incentives that exist at present do not offer residents the financial support to undertake the deep retrofits which would allow occupants to benefit from low energy bills and high thermal comfort now and in the future. There is also a danger that the new drive to retrofit old properties becomes a new ‘slum clearance’ programme (see this book’s ‘Historical Overview’), which would have significant social, cultural and environmental disadvantages over deep retrofits.51 An example of deep retrofit with wider socio-economic considerations is the work in Hull by Giroscope, a social enterprise which turns empty houses into homes for those in need.52 They do so by buying empty properties and upgrading them to higher energy-efficiency standards, which is crucial to keep bills affordable for residents and to minimise rent arrears. The retrofit process typically involves prospective tenants, giving them a feeling of ownership and community involvement; they also acquire new skills and real hands-on experience of the building trades. These case studies serve as a reminder that deep retrofits need to include varied income groups, and that different models for upgrading existing buildings can contribute to a future that is more energy efficient as well as socially sustainable.

RADICAL TRANSFORMATIONS Among recent retrofit adaptations, there are some that transform buildings into radically new spatial configurations – often with substantial demolition work – resulting in a new building with old parts rather than an old building with new additions. There can be problematic examples of this kind of approach, some of which have made headlines, such as extreme forms of ‘façadism’: UCL’s New Hall at 465 Caledonian Road, Holloway, for example, leaves the facade of the existing building standing but unconnected in any obvious way to the new building behind it. It picked up the Carbuncle Cup in 2013 for the worst building of the year (Figure 10.8).53 The decision to retain only the facade seems driven by floor area maximisation and makes only a token gesture to heritage, presumably in order to achieve planning approval. Such an example also shows how superficial the perception of heritage and what is worth retaining can be. There are, however, examples of substantial transformations of Victorian houses that have architectural merits and that have successfully revitalised buildings or whole areas. Chimney Pot Park is an example of a radical transformation of Victorian terraced houses in Salford by ShedKM architects and Urban Splash as developers. The project involved the regeneration of over 300 Victorian terraced houses, with ‘upside-down’ living and car parking located below raised gardens to the rear of the houses, instead of on-street parking.54 Only the street facades of the existing houses were kept; the internal walls, 188

CHAPTER TEN SOFIE PELSMAKERS, DAVID KROLL timber floors, rear walls and roof structures were demolished and replaced with a new steel structure. Chimneys were also removed but are now expressed by ‘chimney’ skylights (hence the project name): ‘A roof light is fixed to the roof where a chimney would have been ... so where smoke once plumed upward, light now shines in, a sly metaphor for the reversal of energy use. It also symbolises a reversal of fortune for these once condemned terraces.’55 Ironically, a key reason for not retaining more of the existing was not architectural, but because – unlike refurbishment – new-build does not attract VAT.56 From a heritage and embodied energy perspective, it is problematic that the current law supports demolition over more sensitive retrofit that could have maintained more of the existing fabric. The scheme’s bold architectural approach received acclaim but also some criticism. For example, on some streets, existing buildings were left partially demolished after Urban Splash had abandoned the final phase of the construction project.57 Moving all living activities to the upper floor has also raised questions about the impact on street activity and safety – problems exacerbated further by back door access. The replacement of rear ground floor windows with top-lighting (to allow for the rear car-park) means that certain areas receive little daylighting or views out. The houses are also considered unaffordable compared to surrounding properties, although for the developer, refurbishment (or facade retention) at large scale makes sense: ‘What we were able to do at Salford was to get a critical mass of a number of streets so that it becomes affordable; whereas so much terraced stock is in multiple, small private landlord ownership and prevents redevelopment.’58 Ownership and affordability is indeed an issue that creates barriers to deep retrofit. There is an urgent need to investigate affordable ways of upgrading houses and, as Chimney Pot Park demonstrates, there is a real benefit from alterations at scale. However, opportunities for this are rare, given that most adjacent houses have different owners.

FIGURE 10.8, ABOVE Caledonian Road, Islington, Carbuncle Cup-winning facadism.

With regard to energy performance, the scheme made significant improvements and was assessed under a now withdrawn EcoHomes assessment rating scheme as ‘very good’, but it has failed to meet more ambitious targets to meet government carbon reduction commitments. Like the ‘House of Trace’, this is a missed opportunity especially given the radical nature of the transformation. In this case, the scale at which it 189

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES was undertaken further exacerbates the impact. The embodied energy from re-building and demolition could have been offset by in-use energy savings. Another example of a radical transformation of a semi-detached Victorian house that achieves more significant energy-efficiency improvements is the Zero Carbon House by Associated Architects and its associate and owner John Christophers in Birmingham (Figure 10.9).59 The house has been superinsulated, and its remaining low-energy use and associated carbon emissions are offset by solar panels, earning it Zero Carbon House status.60 The project has been extensively monitored in terms of energy use and it was even found to be ‘zero carbon negative’ – offsetting its carbon emissions by more than is associated with its energy use.61 The Victorian house has been radically altered by an extension, while maintaining existing brickwork, and the building fabric has been upgraded with impressive results: ‘The walls and roof are 16 times better than the original building in their insulation standard and 28 times better in airtightness.’62 The entire rear facade was rendered with 280mm of insulation. To the existing front facade, 350mm thick cellulose (vapour permeable) insulation was added internally – going beyond passivhaus standard.63 A radical approach was also taken to the layout and structure of the original house. The rendered, brick- and timber-clad extension deliberately contrasts with the roof shape of the existing house, projecting beyond the original building height. According to the architect, the ‘dormer and oriel windows relate to the rich roof-scape of surrounding Arts and Crafts houses in Moseley and Balsall Heath. Although the scale and materials are contextual, the architecture is modern, not pretending to be Victorian pastiche.’64 Internally, spaces are interesting and generous and have good daylighting. Some rooms are timberclad while others celebrate the memory of the existing external walls – which have now become internal walls – by leaving the existing bricks exposed.65 The architect explains this radical approach to retrofitting the existing house: ‘We wanted to demonstrate that green buildings do not have to “be dull” or sacrifice high design standards. We wanted to have both architectural and environmental excellence.’66

FIGURE 10.9, ABOVE Tindal Street, Balsall Heath, Birmingham. Zero Carbon House by architect John Christophers. 190

These projects illustrate the potential for radical alterations and remodelling in Victorian houses. The aesthetic and heritage value of these example case studies will be experienced

CHAPTER TEN SOFIE PELSMAKERS, DAVID KROLL differently by different stakeholders and are subject to project-specific discussions. However, they illustrate that Victorian houses have the robustness to be radically altered for an extended lifespan – and show what can be achieved architecturally and environmentally.

CONCLUSION Energy conservation is no longer optional: it is a necessity as a prerequisite to heritage and other values. Nor can heritage conservation any longer be regarded as separate from energy conservation; the latter ensures that the former can be experienced with delight for decades and centuries to come – by protecting the fabric, by providing affordable thermal comfort and by mitigating climate change. Equally, heritage values should not be neglected in the quest to reduce energy use and carbon emissions; our built heritage makes spaces and places loved and desirable – necessary ingredients for the durable use of buildings. Truly sustainable retrofits, therefore, are those that combine deep retrofit with respect for heritage. Unfortunately, there are still too few exemplary projects that balance heritage and energy conservation, which are often viewed as competing demands. There is an opportunity for award-winning, high-quality architecture to set an example to support the creation of socially, economically and environmentally sustainable retrofits that also value heritage. Deep retrofit should not just mean a deep reduction in energy use, but also a deep understanding of heritage and of what should be conserved. The case studies in this chapter illustrate that some architects and clients have taken steps in this direction. The highlighted retrofit approaches also show the wider potential of retrofit beyond the energyefficiency and heritage discussion. The case studies illustrate, for example, the diverse architectural potential of retrofit projects, showing that it is also an opportunity to redefine buildings – that valuing heritage and architectural creativity are not mutually exclusive but can and should be combined with necessary energy-conservation approaches to ensure a sustainable future for Victorian housing and its residents. Many of the case studies reflect an architectural language inspired by the work of twentieth-century Modernist architects, who saw their role in appropriating the possibilities of new materials and technologies for a healthier and more efficient built environment. How would they approach retrofit today with the challenge we face to significantly reduce carbon emissions? Any new extension and retrofit project could be an opportunity not only to create a new aesthetic, with new technology and spatial arrangements, but also to update energy-efficiency to a level that will ensure the building can function without compromising future needs. Retrofit of existing housing can be an opportunity for renewal, more sustainable living and for continued appreciation of heritage, if done well.

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There is something very concerning about the recent race for numbers. It seems that whoever you speak to – whether a local councillor concerned about the lack of affordable housing, a planner wondering how on earth we are going to meet the housing targets, or a commercial ‘house builder’ thinking site value, speed and profit – the conversations eventually sound the same: ‘How many and how quickly?’ What is more alarming is the way in which this mantra has become part of a collective subconscious, distorting our judgments and our decisions about how we should live. Throughout London and the south-east the results of this attitude, while initially manifest as quotas or targets, are now being delivered at an alarming rate. ‘Denser, higher, quicker’ is reshaping our built environment beyond any domestic recognition, and the race for numbers has become the default justification for politicians, property developers and planning departments. Standardisation and repetition are synonymous with faster and cheaper which, when translated into residential buildings, results in the systematised planning of living space and the mass production of the building components that enclose it. Homes become units, and the more they are stacked both horizontally and vertically, the more can be fitted onto the land on which they stand. If materials and components are the same, then the buildings are cheaper and quicker to construct. When ten becomes 100 and 100 becomes 1,000, the relentless uniformity results in anonymity and ultimately the loss of identity. Which is my house? Where do I live? The very values of place and home are being lost. The race for numbers, however, is not a new phenomenon. The very same issues existed in post-war Britain where the demand for housing married perfectly with the Modernist movement and the need to build cheaply and quickly. Discussed in the 1950s, built in the 1960s, and inhabited in the 1970s, projects had similar justifications and of course very similar results. The slab blocks of the 1960s and 1970s were the prefabricated winning formula, realised with great pride in almost every major city in the country. After only a decade or so, however, the solution to the numbers problem was showing signs of social failure, and was eventually considered to be an insoluble problem to which it seemed the only answer was to move out, demolish and start again. The costs are catastrophic and no local authority has the appetite – or even dares – to quantify what this figure really is. Instead, the removal of council estates is now a key part of urban regeneration as it aligns perfectly with the race for numbers in that it provides an opportunity for 193

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES densities to be increased (Figure 11.1). In the past, however, there have been countless instances where increased densities have been addressed by communities with very simple technologies, limited resources and challenging living conditions. During the Italian Renaissance, Florence, Verona and Venice all expanded rapidly yet maintained a sense of community. In seventeenth-century Amsterdam, economic growth pushed the city to create the new community of Jordaan to house the increasing numbers of working-class and immigrant people. And in late nineteenth-century London, high-density elegant mansion blocks were built in Battersea, Maida Vale and Knightsbridge, with clear identity and character to accommodate changing demographics and rapid population growth. Although these examples were expressed through different architectural styles and made from different materials, they have one thing in common – a collective sense of community that is identifiable and allows each generation to feel ‘part of’ and to ‘contribute to’ this community (Figure 11.2). As an architect, I have worked for much of my career in medieval and historic towns, observing and trying to understand why they have such integrity, with communities having developed over hundreds of years, and why each generation maintains a strong affinity with the place. So, when confronted with our first high-density housing project, my instinct was to look more closely at these historic examples rather than many of the principles of contemporary housing defined in the theories of the Modern Movement and built during the second half of the twentieth century. The first question is ‘Where do I live?’ – or, more importantly, ‘Where is my home?’ In any city, and particularly a large city like London, the answer is more often than not the name of a part of the town or what used to be a village before they all joined up: Camden, Maida Vale, Islington, Brixton, Clapham, Dulwich and many more (Figures 11.3 and 4). This is important not just for location purposes; what seems much more important is the type of community that exists within these places, and the established strength of this community, whether you grew up there or moved there as an outsider. Some communities have existed for centuries and others for a handful of generations; in either case, however, they are reliant on the time it takes for members of these communities to contribute in a way that makes a difference. These contributions or differences then 194

CHAPTER ELEVEN SIMON HUDSPITH build on each other, becoming readable through what is built or changed. When successful, this is reinforced over time, each generation contributing something new while at the same time reinforcing the values of the existing community. Whether this takes 20 years or 200, the time factor for the expression of the community is crucial to its success. The challenge of contemporary residential developments is that they are immediate, with large numbers of residents taking occupation in very short periods of time. There is no time for a community to develop, for the individual to make their mark or respond to the contributions of others. To counter this problem, by expressing buildings as a collection – or as groups of homes rather than as a unified block – inherently suggests that there might be a ‘coming together’ rather than an imposed system. It also suggests that there may be an opportunity for differences within the group. The concept of the group, by its very nature, is synonymous with the idea of community, as it relates directly to our own experiences and understanding of the ‘family’, and in turn is how groups of families might underpin the idea of community. In practical terms, this could manifest itself as repeated similar, but not identical, forms, or a single material that may vary in colour or texture or be assembled in a slightly different configuration.

FIGURE 11.1, OPPOSITE, TOP Aylesbury Estate, 1963–1977, currently being redeveloped. FIGURE 11.2, OPPOSITE, BOTTOM Mansion flats of the 1890s on Prince of Wales Drive, Battersea. FIGURE 11.3, ABOVE, LEFT Brailsford Road, Tulse Hill, terraces of the 1880s with unusual and varying rooflines. FIGURE 11. 4, ABOVE, RIGHT Carlton Avenue, Dulwich Village. Variation and repetition in semi-detached houses.

The idea of group also suggests that there is an opportunity to accommodate differences. This raises the next key need: the expression of the individual within a community. In historic terms, this expression probably starts with the vernacular, which in its simplest form grows out of an understanding of working with readily available materials, but then technically develops over time to produce quite sophisticated techniques for building. During this process each generation or individual interprets the principles in a slightly different way, which in turn creates a natural variation or an individual expression within a common set of rules. This same principle seems to apply across the skill set. Whether through self-builders or master builders (medieval to eighteenth century) or through the relatively recent emergence of the architect as designer: individual expression within a common set of rules is a building block for establishing communities. Jordaan is a glorious example. The principal building form of the houses is repeated through plot facades of three to six storeys, primarily made from brick with pitched gables, and with 195

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES wooden window frames often lined in stucco or stone. The place has intensely powerful collections of buildings producing infinite variety that at the same time allow individual expression to be an integral part of the community. Subsequent generations immediately relate to this – not just builders, but also as buyers, primarily because it answers the two fundamental questions, ‘Where do I live?’ (‘In this identifiable strong community’) and ‘Which is my home?’ (‘The house with the brown bricks and tall windows, next to the one with blue bricks.’) A century later, Georgian architects in Britain were applying a more controlled approach to the same principles. And despite the common view that what is great about Georgian architecture is its consistency, the great squares of London are full of subtle differences within a common language (Figure 11.5). Another century on and the Victorians were rolling out mass housing across London. They used very similar house plans and the houses were almost exclusively made from London stock bricks and red bricks, and elaborated with bay windows and gables. The streets are the basis of the community and, although the consistent language creates uniformity, there are endless subtle differences to give the individual a sense that their home is unique. Rarely is there more than a handful of houses exactly the same. When combined with the opportunity of individual expression through front doors gates and gardens, each house is unique (Figure 11.6). During the early design stages of our first high-density housing scheme in Bear Lane, Southwark, about 10 years ago, I was not consciously thinking of these principles in the way I have described above. Ideas were collected from a number of different sources, including Italian hill towns, the Giants’ Causeway, and even 1960s housing developments, and explored through a series of sketches and models at various scales, then gradually refined into a final design. Subconsciously, however, those two questions ‘Where do I live?’ and ‘Which is my house?’ were guiding many of the ideas and subsequent decisions. The principles that emerged were: a group of townhouses clustered around a courtyard, responding both to the constraints of the site and more importantly to their FIGURE 11.5, ABOVE, TOP neighbours, as members of a community; facades that express Camberwell Grove Conservation Area houses a variety of eras and each house with subtle change in size, recess and projection, architectural expression. suggesting that they may have been built at different times by FIGURE 11.6, ABOVE, BOTTOM different people; the use of a vernacular language of brickwork, Criffel Avenue, Streatham. Elaborate features on a corner detached present in the warehouses that previously existed and were house. 196

CHAPTER ELEVEN SIMON HUDSPITH prevalent building types in the area; windows expressive of hierarchy within each facade so that bedrooms, kitchen and living rooms have a relative importance and work around an inset and primarily private balcony that engages with the primary living spaces; varied colours of brick and window configuration with details that don’t quite make sense, alluding to the idea that these buildings could have developed over time and that every home is unique (Figures 11.7 and 8). Following shortly after Bear Lane, Royal Road was another high-density residential scheme comprising 96 affordable homes near Kennington Park in South London. This project was the result of a competition run by Southwark Council to re-house residents from the Heygate Estate, which was about to be demolished as part of the regeneration of the Elephant and Castle area. The Heygate Estate was in many ways the quintessential 1960s slab block, with all of the associated problems, and the subject of great debate on the relative benefits of urban renewal through demolition – especially in relation to the loss of affordable housing numbers on the site. For us, it was the perfect opportunity to see if a new community could be created that embodied many of the ideas that had been explored at Bear Lane, and hopefully to raise the bar for the standard of affordable housing. It was also an opportunity to further develop a clearer understanding of how ‘Where do I live?’ and ‘Which is my house?’ could inform our design. Luckily there was a group of mature trees around the periphery of the site that helped establish an immediate character and setting. In trying to keep as many of these trees as possible, we pulled the mass of the building back from the edge of the site, with a core at each corner centred on a cruciform plan with radial apartments projecting in each direction. The circulation space is covered, although open to the elements to allow the free movement of air and long views to the surrounding area. Each apartment has its own front door and is detached from its neighbours, providing a triple-aspect living room with views over the retained mature trees (Figures 11.9 and 10). FIGURE 11.7, ABOVE, TOP Bear Lane, Panter Hudspith Architects, completed 2009, stacked multi-storey forms contort the reality of single-storey flat planning inside. FIGURE 11.8, ABOVE, BOTTOM Design model for Bear Lane. Architecture divides building volume into distinct bays with unique frontages.

On the east and west sides of the scheme, the cores are then linked with a series of four- and five-storey ‘town houses’, again with their own front doors, that complete the enclosure to a central communal courtyard which is the heart of the community. Three- and four-bedroom maisonettes with front and back gardens occupy the lower storeys, while the upper 197

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floors are connected by individual bridges from each of the four cores. At the top of the building the stepping of blocks provides a roof terrace for the apartment above and at the very top of each core there are three-bedroom maisonettes with roof gardens over the apartment below. Although there was some repetition of apartment plans on the middle floors, the need to make every apartment unique was still central to designing the architecture.

FIGURE 11.9, ABOVE Royal Road, Panter Hudspith Architects, completed 2013. Divided into distinct blocks with articulated elevations. FIGURE 11.10, OPPOSITE Royal Road. Articulated elevations create unique frontages for each of the 96 homes in the development. 198

As at Bear Lane, two similar tones of bricks were used, although – instead of shifting the planes of the facade – this time the masonry was carved into, using ‘saw-tooth’ brickwork. A set of simple rules was established for how the saw-tooth brickwork could amplify the more important windows, or suggest that windows may have once existed but had subsequently been blocked up. Each of the three architects working on the project was asked to design various parts of the elevations using these

CHAPTER ELEVEN SIMON HUDSPITH rules, although they worked in semi-isolation. This created a natural variation within a given language, alluding to the idea of a community changing over time with each generation contributing something slightly different and making the elevation of each apartment unique. The design aims to support this important sentiment among residents to be able to say: ‘This is my home!’ I would not begin to claim that the ideas we have explored in Bear Lane and Royal Road are solutions to the problems that I have identified in the high-density housing of the 1960s and its current resurgence in the race for numbers. Nor do they begin to have the equivalent vitality and deep-rooted sense of community and identity that exists within our historic towns and cities – that can only develop over time. I do hope, however, that these example projects are built examples responding to the questions of ‘Where do I live?’ and ‘Which is my house?’ And I hope they show that affording a little more thought and sensitivity to the design of our housing could help to make a new building feel less anonymous and more like a home – a place that is identifiably unique but also part of a local community.

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United Nations, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision. Highlights, Department of Economic and Social Affairs (Population Division), 2014. ‘The Grip Tightens’, The Economist, 30 April 2016: www. economist.com/news/britain/21697575-faulty-land-useregulation-throttling-capital-grip-tightens (accessed 15 May 2016). Belinda Turffrey, The Human Cost: How the Lack of Affordable Housing Impacts on All Aspects of Life, Shelter, 2010: england. shelter.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/268752/The_ Human_Cost.pdf (accessed 22 Aug. 2016). National Housing Federation, Home Truths 2015/2016: The Housing Market in London: www.housing.org.uk/resource-library/ browse/home-truths-2015-2016-the-housing-market-in-london (accessed 18 May 2016). ‘The Grip Tightens’, op.cit. Jonn Elledge, ‘Seven Maps and Charts about London’s Housing Market Which Will Make You Sad’, CityMetric, 14 March 2016: www.citymetric.com/business/seven-maps-and-charts-aboutlondons-housing-market-which-will-make-you-sad-1917 (accessed 22 Aug. 2016). Claire Bennie, ‘Competition Background Essay’, in NLA New Ideas for Housing London, New London Architecture, 2015, p.6: www. newlondonarchitecture.org/docs/nla_housing_essay.pdf (accessed 15 May 2016). The next two paragraphs draw on Bennie’s essay, an excellent summary of key factors in London’s housing situation. Molior London Limited, Who Buys New Homes in London and Why?, British Property Federation, Feb. 2014, p.2: www.bpf.org.uk/ sites/default/files/resources/BPF-Who-buys-new-homes-inLondon-and-why.pdf (accessed 26 May 2016). See for example David Pegg, Helena Bengtsson and Holly Watt, ‘Revealed: The Tycoons and World Leaders Who Built Secret UK Property Empires’, The Guardian, 5 April 2016: www.theguardian. com/news/2016/apr/05/panama-papers-world-leaderstycoons-secret-property-empires (accessed 18 May 2016). Katie Morley, ‘“Generation Rent” Dominates London Property Market for the First Time’, The Telegraph, 19 Feb. 2016: www. telegraph.co.uk/personal-banking/mortgages/generation-rentdominates-london-property-market-for-the-first-t (accessed 18 Aug. 2016). National Housing Federation, Home Truths 2015/2016. Bennie 2015, pp.9–10. Colin Wiles, ‘Affordable Housing Does Not Mean What You Think It Means’, The Guardian, 3 Feb. 2014: www.theguardian.com/ housing-network/2014/feb/03/affordable-housing-meaning-

rent-social-housing (accessed 13 Aug. 2016). 14. Greater London Authority, The London Strategic Housing Land Availability Assessment 2013, Mayor of London, Jan. 2014, pp.104–5: www.london.gov.uk/file/15569/ download?token=M9dckY12 (accessed 26 May 2016). 15. See for example: Strategic Planning Team, Tower Hamlets Core Strategy Development Plan Document 2025, Tower Hamlets Council, Sept. 2010, pp.99–125: www.towerhamlets.gov.uk/ Documents/Planning-and-building-control/Strategic-Planning/ Local-Plan/Core-Strategy-and-MDD/Core-Strategy-lowresolution.pdf (accessed 22 Aug. 2016). 16. See for example, HTA Design LLP and Pollard Thomas Edwards, Transforming Suburbia: Supurbia Semi-Permissive, 2015: www. pollardthomasedwards.co.uk/download/supurbiasemipermissive_v5_LR.pdf (accessed 22 Aug. 2016); Jeremy Melvin, ‘A Man with a Plan’, The Architects’ Journal, 1 July 2003, pp.26–7. 17. The Lyons Housing Commission, The Lyons Housing Review: Mobilising across the Nation to Build the Homes Our Children Need, Oct. 2014, p.162: www.yourbritain.org.uk/uploads/editor/files/ The_Lyons_Housing_Review_2.pdf (accessed 22 Aug. 2016). 18. Steen Eiler Rasmussen, London: The Unique City, Cape, London 1937. 19. See for example, rules about acceptable building heights: ‘The London Building Acts 1894–1926’, Kelly’s Directories, London 1927. 20. Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius, Tower Block: Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, Yale University Press, London and New Haven 1994, pp.331–2. 21. The Lyons Housing Review, p.101. 22. Ibid., p.7. 23. JWR Whitehand, ‘The Makers of British Towns: Architects, Builders and Property Owners, c.1850–1939’, Journal of Historical Geography, vol.18, no.4, 1992, pp.417–38 24. The Lyons Housing Review, p.23 25. Localism Act 2011; Self-Build and Custom Housebuilding Act 2015. 26. Mark Atkinson, ‘Triple Boost for Recovery’, The Guardian, 2 July 1999: www.theguardian.com/business/1999/jul/02/ukeconomy. housingmarket (accessed 19 May 2016); Larry Elliott, ‘Bank Sees No Need to Cool House Price Boom’, The Guardian, 30 April 2002: www.theguardian.com/business/2002/apr/30/housingmarket. houseprices (accessed 19 May 2016). 27. David Walker, ‘David Walker on Rising Property Prices’, The Guardian, 5 April 2002: www.theguardian.com/business/2002/ apr/05/housingmarket.houseprices (accessed 19 May 2016). 28. National Housing Federation, Home Truths 2015/2016.

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MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES 29. ‘The Grip Tightens’, op.cit. 30. Daniel Bentley, The Housing Question: Overcoming the Shortage of Homes, Civitas, London 2016, p.42. 31. Most of the ideas shortlisted for a recent competition – ‘New Ideas for Housing London’, organised by New London Architecture (NLA) with the Greater London Authority (Mayor of London) – responded to exactly these questions, addressing finance, urban planning, densification, etc. 32. Katharina Knoll, Moritz Schularick and Thomas Michael Steger, No Price Like Home: Global House Prices, 1870–2012, Sept. 2014, p.35: ssrn.com.access.library.unisa.edu.au/abstract=2503396 (accessed 21 May 2016). 33. Gov.uk, ‘Prime Minister Pledges to Transform Sink Estates’, press release, 10 Jan. 2016: www.gov.uk/government/news/primeminister-pledges-to-transform-sink-estates (accessed 21 May 2016). 34. John Tosh, The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods, and New Directions in the Study of Modern History, Longman, Abingdon 1984, revised ed. 2006, p.334

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

1.

Greater London Authority, ‘2014 Round Population Projections’: data.london.gov.uk/dataset/2014-round-population-projections (accessed 17 Aug. 2016). 2. Charles Dickens, ‘Oliver Twist’, Puffin Classics, London, 1994 (1837-9), p. 468. 3. For a short history of London’s housing from the medieval to the post-modern, see Colin Thom, Researching London’s Houses: An Archives Guide, Historical Publications, London 2005, pp.7–46. For a historiographical summary, see Tanis Hinchcliffe, ‘Pandora’s Box: Forty Years of Housing History’, London Journal, vol.41 no.1, March 2016, pp.1–16. 4. CC Knowles and PH Pitt, The History of Building Regulation in London: 1189–1972, Architectural Press, London 1972, pp.12–25. 5. John Stow, A Survey of London (1598), ed. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1908, vol.2, p.72. See also WC Baer, ‘Housing for the Lesser Sort in Stuart London: Findings from Certificates, and Returns of Divided Houses’, London Journal, vol.33, no.3, Nov. 2008, pp.61–88. 6. Craig Spence, London in the 1690s: A Social Atlas, Centre for Metropolitan History, Institute for Historical Research, University of London, 2000, p.56. 7. John Gwynn, London and Westminster Improved, London 1766, p. viii. 8. Linda Clarke, Building Capitalism: Historical Change and the Labour Process in the Production of the Built Environment, Routledge, London 1992. 9. Oxford English Dictionary online. 10. George Gissing, The Nether World, Smith, Elder & Co., London 1889, Chapter 30. 11. See www.history.ac.uk/podcasts/mobilising-londons-housinghistories-provision-homes-1850/one-one-down-london-cottage202

19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

flat (accessed 17 Aug. 2016). Emily Gee, ‘“Where shall she live?”: Housing the New Working Woman in Late Victorian and Edwardian London’, in Geoff Brandwood (ed.), Living, Leisure and Law: Eight Building Types in England 1800–1941, Spire Books, Reading 2010, pp.89–109. Susan Beattie, A Revolution in London Housing: LCC Housing Architects and their Work, 1893–1914, Architectural Press, London 1980. Mark Swenarton, Homes Fit for Heroes: The Politics and Architecture of Early State Housing in Britain, Heinemann, London 1981. See www.history.ac.uk/podcasts/mobilising-londons-housinghistories-provision-homes-1850/location-location-location (accessed 17 Aug. 2016). See www.history.ac.uk/podcasts/mobilising-londons-housinghistories-provision-homes-1850/listing-social-housing-trellick (accessed 17 Aug. 2016). Elain Harwood, Space, Hope and Brutalism: English Architecture, 1945–1975, Yale University Press, London and New Haven 2015, pp.56–75, 82–100. Mark Swenarton, ‘Politics Versus Architecture: The Alexandra Road Public Enquiry of 1978–1981’, Planning Perspectives, vol.29, no.4, 2014, pp.423–46. Dominic Severs, ‘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, 2010, pp.449–97. Colin Ward, ‘Walter Segal – Community Architect’, Diggers and Dreamers: A Directory of Alternative Living: www.segalselfbuild.co. uk/news/waltersegalbycol.html (accessed 17 Aug. 2016). Ben Campkin, Remaking London: Decline and Regeneration in Urban Culture, IB Tauris, London, 2013, pp.77–104. Against the grain, and to great surprise, the compulsory purchase of flats on the Aylesbury Estate was blocked in September 2016 as being a breach of the human rights of residents. William Morris, ‘The housing of the poor’, Justice, 19 July 1884, p.4. Another that has is New York. See David Madden and Peter Marcuse, In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis, Verso, London and New York 2016.

CHAPTER ONE 1. 2. 3.

4.

‘Three Garden Cities to Be Built, Nick Clegg Announces’, BBC News, 14 April 2014. Christopher Hope, ‘Thousands of New Homes on Green Belt in Biggest Shake-up for 30 Years’, The Telegraph, 12 July 2015. The late nineteenth century was the second most productive period of private sector housebuilding in London, only surpassed by the boom of the inter-war period. See ‘Housing in London 2014’, Greater London Authority, 2014, p.13. In a recent survey among architects in the UK, ‘more than half hailed the Victorian era for producing the greatest legacy’. Will Hurst and Marguerite Lazell, ‘Government Fails on Pledge for Good Design’, Building Design, 3 Oct. 2008, p.1.

REFERENCES 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

Christopher Costelloe, ‘Newsletter’, Victorian Society, July 2015, p.3. MacCormac Jamieson Pritchard, ‘Sustainable Suburbia: Work in Progress’, MJP, London 2005. Ben Derbyshire et al., ‘Supurbia’, in New Ideas for Housing: NLA Insight Study, New London Architecture, London 2015, p.58. Katharina Knoll, Moritz Schularick, and Thomas Michael Steger, ‘No Price Like Home: Global House Prices, 1870–2012’, Social Science Research Network, Rochester, New York 1 Sept. 2014: papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2503396 (accessed 18 Sept. 2016). Lambeth Archives, Minet Estate Archive, Camberwell & Lambeth 1767–1970 . The basic distinction between these three methods of speculative development – leasehold, freehold and direct contracting – can be found in various books on the topic. In this case, it is largely based on Francis Howkins, An Introduction to the Development of Private Building Estates and Town Planning, Estates Gazette, London 1926. Godfrey Smith, Hither Green: The Forgotten Hamlet, G Smith, London 1997. JWR Whitehand, ‘The Makers of British Towns: Architects, Builders and Property Owners, c.1850–1939’, Journal of Historical Geography, vol.18, 1992, p.432. Arthur Middleton Edwards, The Design of Suburbia: a Critical Study in Environmental History, Pembridge Press, London 1981, p.22. The history of their escape from France is documented in the diaries of Isaac Minet, published by William Minet, one of his descendants. William Minet and Isaac Minet, The Huguenot Family of Minet, Spottiswoode, London 1892. For the build dates of houses on the estate, see: Minet Estate Archive IV/83/1/1/8/1, Collissons & Dawes, ‘Miss Susan Minet to Peter Brissault Minet Esq. and Others: Conveyance of Miss Minet’s Camberwell Estate’, 1 June 1952. This can be seen on the Ordnance Survey map of 1870. In 1872, he also sold the separate, smaller southern portion of the estate. For more information about the station and railway, see: A. Gray, The London, Chatham & Dover Railway, Meresborough, Rainham, Kent 1984, p.65. Part of this plot had previously been leased by Joseph Myatt as a market garden. The park on the estate was later named after him and he is credited with making rhubarb popular as a food rather than a medicine. Joseph Myatt initially leased his plot on a ten-year term, but is listed on an 1841 lease map by Messrs Driver as a yearly tenant. He died in 1855 but, according to the rental records, the business continued under his name until 1869. Minet Estate Archive IV/83/2/1/1 and 4; Francis Sheppard (ed.), Survey of London, Vol. 26: Southern Lambeth, London County Council, London 1956, pp.141–5; London Metropolitan Archives, DW/T/0524, ‘Transcript of Burials’ (Nunhead Cemetery, Linden Grove, Camberwell, 1855), p.71. Minet Estate Archive IV/83/1/5/1/24, ‘Parsons & Bamford Lease’.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

According to the estate rental records, Mayhew ‘represented’ Parsons & Bamford: see Minet Estate Archive IV/83/2/1/10. Anthony Banfield (ed.), Stapleton’s Real Estate Management Practice, Estates Gazette, London 2005, p.6. For more about the role of surveyors in nineteenth-century speculative housing, see: David Kroll, ‘The Other Architects Who Made London: Planning and Design of Speculative Housing c.1870–1939’, PhD thesis, University of London 2013, pp.117–20. ‘The Metropolis Local Management Amendment Act, 1862’, Virtue Brothers & Company, London 1862. ‘The London Building Acts 1894–1926’, Kelly’s Directories, London 1927. The National Archives, RE11/670 & RG 12/462, folios 153–5, 1891 Census Return. Rightmove, ‘House Prices in SE5 9HR’: www.rightmove.co.uk/ house-prices/SE5-9HR.html (accessed 3 May 2016). Neil Jackson, ‘The Speculative House in London c.1832–1914’, PhD thesis, Polytechnic of the South Bank, 1982, p.98. Minet Estate Archive, IV/83/1/5/1/24. Minet Estate Archive, IV/83/1/3/28. James Henry Parsons, for example, lived with his family in 1 Knatchbull Road, in one of the houses he built, where he was also registered as a builder. The National Archives, 1871 Census Return. This is evident from approved planning applications for conversions and the type of properties on sale on popular real-estate sites like Rightmove. Minet Estate Archive, IV/83/1/5, newspaper cutout: ‘The Passing of William Minet’, The Free Press, 27 Jan. 1933; Minet Estate Archive, Fred Curtis’s letter book (uncatalogued), e.g., letter 78. Minet Estate Archive, IV/83/1/1/7, AJ Carpenter, ‘Letter of March 2nd, 1933, to Messrs Deloitte, Plender, Griffiths & Co.’ Minet Estate Archive, IV/83/1/5. Minet Estate Archive, Curtis’s letter book (uncatalogued). Minet Estate Archive, IV/83/1/1/8/1, Collissons & Dawes, ‘Miss Susan Minet to Peter Brissault Minet Esq. and Others: Conveyance of Miss Minet’s Camberwell Estate’, 1 June 1952. A record of the initial leaseholders on the estate can be found in this document. Ibid. ‘Obituary: Mr. William Minet’, The Times, 24 Jan. 1933, p.12. Rebecca Preston, ‘An Extended History of Myatt’s Fields Park’, Oct. 2003, www.myattsfieldspark.info/extended-history.html (accessed 17 April 2012). ‘Charles Booth Online Archive’: booth.lse.ac.uk (accessed 10 Aug. 2011). Minet Estate Archive, IV/83/3/1/18. Ibid. GL Saunders, ‘Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Sciences’, Sheffield Meeting, 1865, p.454. 203

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES 44. 45. 46. 47.

Edwards 1981, pp.61–5. Minet Estate Archive, IV/83/3/1/14. Minet Estate Archive, Curtis’s letter book (uncatalogued). ‘Self-Build: It’s Time to Go Dutch’, The Guardian, Nov. 25, 2011: www.theguardian.com/money/2011/nov/25/self-build-godutch (accessed 18 Sept. 2016); ‘Graven Hill: Self-Build Homes’: www.gravenhill.co.uk (accessed 18 Aug. 2016). 48. The unpredictability of the current planning system in London has been highlighted by a number of experts. See for example Roger Zogolovitch, Shouldn’t we all be developers?, Artifice, London 2015. 49. Submitted with more detail to a recent ideas competition to address the London housing crisis, this idea was selected as one of the winning entries. David Kroll, ‘Investing in London’s Future by Learning from its Past’, in New Ideas for Housing: NLA Insight Study, New London Architecture, London 2015, pp.96–7. 50. See for example: Federico Savini, Willem R Boterman, Wouter PC van Gent and Stan Majoor, ‘Amsterdam in the 21st century: Geography, housing, spatial development and politics’, Cities, vol.52, 2016, pp.103–13.

CHAPTER TWO 1.

Eric Gill, Eric Gill: Autobiography, Lund Humphries, London 1992, p.108; Fiona MacCarthy, Eric Gill, Faber and Faber, London 1989, pp.59–61. 2. R Price-Williams, ‘The Population of London, 1801–81’, Journal of the Statistical Society of London, vol.48, no.3, Sept. 1885, p.376. 3. This section is based generally on Colin Thom (ed.), Survey of London, vol.50, Battersea Part 2: Houses and Housing, Yale University Press, London and New Haven 2013, pp.6–7; Keith Alan Bailey, ‘The Metamorphosis of Battersea 1800–1914: A Building History’, unpublished PhD thesis, Open University 1995, pp.38–40, 99–108. 4. The National Archives, IR 29/34/9 and IR 30/34/9. 5. David Cannadine, ‘Victorian cities: How different?’, Social History, vol.2, no.4, Jan. 1977, p.478. 6. Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London. Third Series: Religious Influences, vol.5, South-East and South-West London, Macmillan, London 1902, pp.187, 193. 7. Anthony S Wohl, The Eternal Slum: Housing and Social Policy in Victorian London, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick and London 2009, pp.155–6, 296, 299–300, 308–9. 8. Booth 1902, pp.165–6, 193; typescript reminiscences in Wandsworth Heritage Service, Battersea Library – Florence Ambridge, ‘An Everyday Story’, 1998; R. Milsom, ‘Arthur Milsom, a Battersea Rise Shopkeeper, by his son’, 2010; Albert Morrish, ‘The Battersea that’s Vanished’, n.d.; Survey of London, pp.157–9. 9. The Times, 30 Jan. 1914, p.4; The Times, 23 March 1914, p.4. 10. JN Tarn, Five Per Cent Philanthropy: An account of housing in urban areas between 1840 and 1914, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1973, pp.26–7.

204

11. Thom 2013, pp.15–16: Booth 1902, p.187. 12. Bailey 1995, pp.109–10, 113. 13. HJ Dyos, ‘The Suburban Development of Greater London, South of the Thames, 1836–1914’, PhD thesis, University of London 1952, pp.376–9. 14. DA Reeder, ‘Capital investment in the western suburbs of Victorian London’, PhD thesis, University of Leicester, 1965, pp.116–21. For Cubitt, see Hermione Hobhouse, Thomas Cubitt: Master Builder, Macmillan, London 1971. 15. Reeder 1965, p.112, referring to Minutes of Evidence, Select Committee on Town Holdings, Parliamentary Papers. 1887 (213), xiii, QQ. 5090–5, 7404–9, 8464–6; HJ Dyos, ‘The Speculative Builders and Developers of Victorian London’, Victorian Studies, vol.11, supplement, Summer 1968, pp.650–4. 16. Bailey 1995, pp.152, 286–7; Keith Alan Bailey, The Development of Building Estates in Battersea 1780–1914, Wandsworth Historical Society, Wandsworth Paper 24, 2012, pp.9–10, 59–63 17. Wandsworth Heritage Service, Battersea Library, Battersea deeds. 18. Dyos 1968, p.660. 19. Except where otherwise noted, this section is based largely on Thom 2013, pp.181–6. 20. Censuses of 1881, 1891; London School Board, Report of a Special Committee on Underfed Children Attending School, 1895, p.58. 21. Poyntz Road Triangle Residents’ Association Report, April 1974, in possession of the Survey of London 22. Thom 2013, p.78. 23. Wandsworth Heritage Service, Battersea Library, Battersea Building Plans, nos.909, 1056, 1060. 24. Ibid., nos.1845, 2080, 2161–2, 2352, 2438. 25. South London Press, 1882, quoted in Wandsworth Council, Three Sisters Conservation Area Draft Appraisal, Oct. 2007. 26. The National Archives, IR 58/88335/1844–1900; IR 58/88336/1906–94: I. Munt, ‘Economic restructuring, culture, and gentrification: A case study in Battersea, London’, in Environment and Planning A, vol.19, 1987, pp.1175–97; Wandsworth Council, Three Sisters Conservation Area Draft Appraisal, Oct. 2007. 27. Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London. First Series: Poverty, vol.1, East, Central and South London, Macmillan, London 1904, pp.288–9, 294; Thom 2013, Chapter 12; Bailey 1995, p.68; Brightside, no.156, June 2012. 28. Thom 2013, pp.350–2; Bailey 1995, pp.192–3; 1871 census; Jerry White, London in the Twentieth Century: A City and its People, Vintage Books, London 2008, p.160. 29. Sandra Wallman (ed.), Living in South London: Perspectives on Battersea 1871–1981, Gower Publishing Co., London 1982; Sandra Wallman, Eight London Households, Tavistock Publications, London 1984; Thom 2013, p.352. 30. Thom 2013, pp.412–13; Bailey 1995, pp.227–8; Bailey 2012 pp.27–8; 1901 census; Rightmove: www.rightmove.co.uk/

REFERENCES

31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

property-for-sale/property-45232073.html (accessed 24 Jan. 2016). Booth 1904, p.295. George R. Sims, How the Poor Live, Chatto & Windus, London 1883; Andrew Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, James Clarke & Co., London 1883. Colin G. Pooley, ‘Mobility in the Victorian City’, in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol.4, no.2, 1979, pp.258–77; Booth 1902, pp.187–8. Cannadine 1977, p.467: Booth 1902, pp.167, 194; Reeder 1965, p.57: Wohl 2009, pp.297–8. Thom 2013, pp.23–7. Wandsworth Heritage Service, Battersea Library, Wandsworth Borough Council Minutes, 1967–8 Munt 1987; Caroline Ross, ‘Battersea’s Rich, New Skyline’, Illustrated London News, 27 Aug. 1988, pp.43–6; Peter Hall, London Voices, London Lives: Tales from a Working Capital, The Policy Press, Bristol 2007, Chapter 2. For the process of ‘super-gentrification’ in a comparable inner-London district, see Tim Butler and Loretta Lees, ‘SuperGentrification in Barnsbury, London: Globalization and Gentrifying Global Elites at the Neighbourhood Level’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, vol.31, no.4, Dec. 2006, pp.467–87. Jay Gardiner, ‘Behind the hype: Sustainable new homes’, in Building, 26 Feb. 2015: www.building.co.uk/behind-the-hypesustainable-new-homes/5074070.article (accessed 3 Jan. 2016). See also the BRE Group’s report on the ‘Sustainable refurbishing of Victorian housing’ by Tim Yates, 2006: www.brebookshop. com/details.jsp?id=224138 (accessed 3 Jan. 2016. ) See Crispin Tomlinson and others, ‘Back to the future: A reexamination of high rise’, BAC Beachcroft report, 24 March 2015: www.dacbeachcroft.com/publications/publications/back-tothe-future-a-re-examination-of-high-rise (accessed 10 March 2016). Anna Winston, ‘David Cameron pledges to demolish UK’s “brutal” council estates’, Dezeen, 11 Jan. 2016: www.dezeen. com/2016/01/11/uk-prime-minister-david-cameron-pledgesdemolish-brutal-council-estates-crime-poverty (accessed 10 March 2016); Loretta Lees, ‘Cameron’s “sink estate” strategy comes at a human cost’, The Conversation, 21 Jan. 2016, www. theconversation.com/camerons-sink-estate-strategy-comes-ata-human-cost-53358 (accessed 10 March 2016). See CABE, ‘Making Higher Densities Work’, 2005: webarchive. nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110118095356/http:/www.cabe.org. uk/files/better-neighbourhoods.pdf (accessed 10 March 2016); www.healthyactivebydesign.com/design-features/housingdiversity (accessed 10 March 2016); Richard MacCormac, ‘Sustainable Suburbia’, in Planning in London, no.61, April–June 2007, p.36. R Glass, ‘The mood of London’, in D Donnison and D Eversley (eds), London: Urban Patterns, Problems and Policies, Heinemann, London 1973, p.426; Paul Watt, ‘Housing Stock Transfers,

Regeneration and State-Led Gentrification in London’, Urban Policy and Research, vol.27, no.3, Sept. 2009, pp.229–42. 44. Oliver Wainwright, ‘The truth about property developers: how they are exploiting planning authorities and ruining our cities’, The Guardian, 17 Sept. 2014: www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/ sep/17/truth-property-developers-builders-exploit-planningcities (accessed 12 Jan. 2016). 45. See for example David Kroll’s prize-winning New London Architecture /GLA competition entry ‘Investing in London’s Future by Learning from its Past’: www.newlondonarchitecture. org/programme/insight-studies1/new-ideas-for-housinglondon--autumn-20151/10-winning-ideas-announced, 12 Oct. 2015 (accessed 10 March 2016); a video of Kroll presenting his work is at www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5jw_2xtIis (accessed 10 March 2016)

CHAPTER THREE 1. The research for this essay was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation under the Marie Heim-Vögtlin Programme. I am grateful to Christine Wagg, Peabody Trust historian, for her helpful comments and many sources she put at our disposal for this publication. 2. The Islington Estate was built on the site of Ward’s Place, an ill-famed overpopulated area close to becoming a slum. Other sites acquired from the Metropolitan Board of Works under the Artisans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Improvement Act of 1875 were obtained through slum clearance – including Whitechapel (1881), Abbey Orchard Street (1882) and Wild Street (1882). However, as Peabody historian Christine Wagg indicates, other early estates were acquired by the trustees from a variety of previous ownerships. The Lawrence Street estate (1870) site was purchased from two private individuals (one of whom was the interior decorator JG Crace); the Blackfriars estate (1871) was built on the site of the Magdalen Hospital for Penitent Prostitutes; the Pimlico estate (1876) site, on previously vacant land alongside the railway sidings to Victoria Station, was purchased from The London Chatham and Dover Railway Company. 3. Cited in Philip Steadman, Building Types and Built Forms, Matador, Kibworth Beauchamp 2014, p.16. 4. Cited in John Nelson Tarn, ‘The Peabody Donation Fund: The Role of a Housing Society in the Nineteenth Century’, Victorian Studies, Sept. 1966, p.38. 5. Ibid., p.37. 6. Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England, London 1: The Cities of London and Westminster, Penguin, London 1973, p.391. 7. Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England, London 2: Except the Cities of London and Westminster, Penguin, London 1973, p.237. 8. Ibid., p.423. 9. Pevsner, London 1, p.666. 10. Ibid., p.98. 11. Ibid., p.391. 12. ‘Bethnal Green – Building and Social Conditions from 1837 to 205

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES 1875’, A History of the County of Middlesex, vol.11, Victoria County History, London, 1998, pp.120–6: www.british-history.ac.uk/ report.aspx?compid=22751&strquery=darbishire (accessed 23 May 2013). 13. Pevsner, London 2, p.71. 14. HA Darbishire, ‘On the Construction of Dwellings for the Poor’, paper at the Architectural Association meeting of 13 Nov. 1863, cited in The Builder, 21 Nov. 1863, p.822. 15. See Robin Evans, ‘Rookeries and Model Dwellings’, in Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays, Architectural Association, London 1997, pp.93–118. 16. Ibid., pp.107–9. 17. Friedrich Engels, ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’, 1845: www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1840/cond-wce/ cwe04.htm (accessed 12 March 2014). 18. Darbishire 1863, p.821. 19. George Peabody, ‘Letter’, The Times, 26 March 1862. Cited in John Nelson Tarn, Five Per Cent Philanthropy: an account of housing in urban areas between 1840 and 1914, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1973, p.45. 20. The first Peabody Trustees were Charles Francis Adams, US Ambassador; Edward Henry Stanley, Colonial and Foreign Secretary; Peabody’s personal friend Curtis Miranda Lampson, a British-naturalised American merchant; Junius Spencer Morgan, Peabody’s business partner; and James Emerson Tennent, then Secretary to the Board of Trade. 21. Cited in Tarn 1973, p.45. By favouring those workmen and artisans who were able to demonstrate a steady income, this stipulation failed to provide for the most vulnerable and incapacitated members of society, in a characteristically Victorian association of physical and moral degradation. 22. Tarn 1966, p.11. 23. Ibid., p.10. 24. Adolf K Placzek, Macmillan Encyclopedia of Architects, Collier Macmillan, London 1982, p.502. Darbishire’s Mancunian origin is mentioned in Alan R Ruston, ‘Unitarian Gothic Building in Hackney, 1858’ in Hackney History, vol.1, London 1995, p.24. 25. HA Darbishire, ‘A Few Suggestions on the Introduction of Coloured Bricks, etc., in Elevations’, RIBA Transactions, Vol.14, 1864–5, p.66. 26. Darbishire 1863, p.822 27. HA Darbishire, ‘Artisans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings’, The Builder, 9 Feb. 1863, p.193. 28. Darbishire, 1863, p.822. 29. Darbishire, ‘On Dwellings for the Poor’, RIBA Transactions, 1st Series, vol.26, 1875–6, p.46. 30. Islington Gazette, 1856. Cited in Appleton’s Journal of Popular Literature Science and Art, 1869. 31. Darbishire 1875–6, p.54. 32. Ibid., p.48. 33. The Peabody Archive contains drawings of planned conversions dated 1939, with works interrupted and actual changes 206

implemented only after the end of the Second World War. Information on the post-war conversion of the Abbey Orchard Street Estate is found in Felix Walter, House Conversion and Improvement, Architectural Press, London 1956, pp.158–65. 34. Darbishire 1863, p.821. 35. Ibid. 36. Following their completion, doubts were raised as to the durability of these blocks, erected without statutory permission and in contravention of the Metropolitan Building Act of 1844. In this case the Trust used a different contractor, Messrs Tall and Company Ltd. The period photographs indicate the use of concrete blocks which were reported to be ‘18 inches thick’. Expert witnesses on the legal case stated that the walls ‘were put together in a liquid state, which did not harden upon the expiration of 24 hours,’ using ‘pieces of stone and broken bricks’ ‘thrown together’ into a mass of Portland cement. A report on the legal proceedings against the contractor was published in the article ‘The Peabody Industrial Dwellings’, in The Evening Standard, 18 June 1872. The buildings were retained and, after incurring bomb damage during the Second World War, were eventually demolished for road widening. 37. Darbishire 1875–6, p.53. 38. Tarn, 1966, p.3. 39. See Steadman 2014, pp.14–16 and 37–9 40. This effect can only be assessed from period photographs. The north end of the development was bombed during the war, and recent landscaping counteracts the tunnel-like effect of the original row, neutralising the original configuration. 41. Tarn 1973, p.84. 42. Tarn 1966, pp.25–38. 43. These were: Abbey Orchard Street, Bedfordbury, Clerkenwell, Herbrand Street, Islington (Blocks E to I only), Old Pye Street (Blocks F to I only), Roscoe Street, Whitechapel, Whitecross Street and Wild Street. 44. The need for dignified, rather than simply adequate, working-class neighbourhoods would only be recognised in the 1890s, under the influence of socialist thinkers like William Morris and their ‘Late Victorian mood of awakened conscience’ (Nikolaus Pevsner, ‘Churches and Public Buildings and the Neglect of the Common Man’, Victorian Architecture, vol.3, 2003, p.114). 45. An early example is the Mills at New Lanark, in Scotland (1826), erected for Robert Owen and possibly based on the residential stone tenements behind Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. 46. See Robin Middleton and David Watkin, Architecture of the Nineteenth Century, Phaidon, Milan, 1980, pp.335–43. 47. Darbishire, ‘A Few Suggestions on the Introduction of Coloured Bricks, etc., in Elevations’, RIBA Transactions, 1st series, vol.14, 1864–5, pp.63–74. 48. Karl Friedrich Schinkel, The English Journey: Journal of a Visit to France and Britain in 1826, David Bindman and Gottfried Riemann (eds), translated by Gayna Walls, Yale University Press, London and New Haven, 1993, p.175.  49. Ted Honderich (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Oxford

REFERENCES University Press, Oxford, 1995, p.857. 50. Edgar Jones, Industrial Architecture in Britain 1750–1939, Batsford, London 1985, p.54. 51. Claire Bennie, email to the author, 19 June 2015. 52. One only needs to look up the Peabody letter-book records in London Metropolitan Archives (ref. ACC/3445/PT/012021). For example: ‘5 Dec. Dear Sirs, Blackfriars [Property]. Another length of rain water pipe is cracked. Please make good at once. Yours truly, J. Crouch’. Most of the recorded supervision and maintenance correspondence at the time is signed – occasionally with Darbishire’s name attached – by John Crouch, Secretary to the Peabody Donation Fund between 1872 and 1901. 53. See note 25. 54. Ellis Woodman, ‘RIBA Stirling Prize 2015 finalist: Darbishire Place by Niall McLaughlin Architects’, The Architects’ Journal, 8 Oct. 2015: www.architectsjournal.co.uk/buildings/riba-stirling-prize-2015finalist-darbishire-place-by-niall-mclaughlin-architects/8690021. article (accessed 20 Oct. 2015).

CHAPTER FOUR 1. Prince’s Foundation for Building Community, Housing London: A Mid-Rise solution, 2014, pp.7, 31: www.housinglondon.org/ Housing-London_DIGITAL.pdf (accessed 16 Dec. 2015). 2. HRH The Prince of Wales, ‘New buildings in old places’, speech at The Prince’s Foundation for Building Community Conference, St James Palace, 31 January 2008; Greater London Authority, Land area and population density, ward and borough, 2015: data.london. gov.uk/dataset/land-area-and-population-density-ward-andborough, 2015 (accessed 16 Dec. 2015); Ami Sedghi and George Arnett, ‘Empty homes in England’, The Guardian, 2 June 2014: www. theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/jun/02/empty-homes-inengland-get-the-data-by-local-authority (accessed 16 Dec. 2015). 3. Superdensity: the Sequel, 2015: www.pollardthomasedwards.co.uk/ download/SUPERDENSITY_2015_download.pdf (accessed 11 Aug. 2016). Includes a series of case studies from Bermondsey, Hackney and Southwark, all with densities of 240–350 homes per hectare, and comprised of buildings of no more than ten storeys. 4. JN Tarn, ‘French Flats for the English in Nineteenth-century London’ in A Sutcliffe (ed.) Multi-Storey Living: The British Working-Class Experience, Croom Helm, London 1974, pp.19–40; Richard Dennis, Cities in Modernity, Cambridge University Press, New York 2008, pp.224–62. 5. F Chambers, Jr., ‘The architectural advantages and deficiencies of London’, The Builder, 12 May 1849, pp.220–1; William Young, ‘“Model” town houses for the middle classes’, The Builder, 1 Dec. 1849, pp.566–9; Henry Morley, ‘Houses in flats’, Household Words, 24 March 1855, pp.182–6; Arthur Ashpitel and John Whichcord, Town Dwellings, John Weale, London 1855; T Roger Smith and WH White, ‘Model dwellings for the rich’, Journal of the Society for Arts, 31 March 1876, pp.456–66. 6. The Builder, 14 July 1849, pp.325–7. This arrangement also had the effect of exempting owners and tenants from liability for Inhabited House Tax, which was re-introduced in 1851 in place of Window

Tax, and levied on all dwellings with an annual value of at least £20. Because each flat opened onto a public walkway, it could be treated as a separate dwelling, valued at less than £20. 7. Donald J Olsen, The City as a Work of Art: London, Paris, Vienna, Yale University Press, London and New Haven 1986, pp.90–6, 114–25; Sharon Marcus, Apartment Stories: City and Home in NineteenthCentury Paris and London, University of California Press, Berkeley 1999. 8. ‘GC’, ‘Living in flats’, The Builder, 9 Feb. 1851, p.79. 9. The Builder, 3 Dec. 1853, pp.721–2. 10. Simon Bradley and Nikolaus Pevsner, Buildings of England. London: 6, Westminster, Penguin, London 2003; Isobel Watson, Westminster and Pimlico Past, Historical Publications, London 1993. 11. Richard Dennis, ‘“Babylonian Flats” in Victorian and Edwardian London’, London Journal, vol.33, no.3, 2008, pp.233–47. 12. ‘Living on flats’, Saturday Review, 23 Oct. 1875, pp.515–16. 13. Oxford English Dictionary (online edition, 2005), ‘Penthouse’, definitions 1d and C2 (accessed 16 Dec. 2015) 14. ‘Chelsea Court’, Flats, July 1897. 15. ‘Wellington Court’, Flats, April 1897. 16. ‘How to take a flat’, Flats, Jan. 1921, pp.iii, vi. 17. William H White, ‘Houses in flats’, The Builder, 25 March 1876, p.291; William H White, ‘Middle-class houses in Paris and central London’, The Builder, 24 Nov.1877, pp.1166–70, and 8 Dec. 1877, pp.1219–21; FE Eales, ‘Dwellings in flats’, Building News, 7 March 1884, pp.360–3; FE Eales, ‘Houses in flats’, The Builder, 8 March 1884, pp.351–3; FE Eales, ‘The arrangement of buildings in flats’, The Builder, 15 March 1884, p.386. 18. Richard Dennis, ‘Reconciling geographies, representing modernities’ in IS Black and RA Butlin (eds), Place, Culture and Identity, Les Presses de l’Université Laval, Quebec 2001, pp.17–43. 19. White 1877, p.1170. 20. Eales 1884b, p.352; Eales 1884c, p.386. 21. Eales 1884b, p.351. 22. Sydney Perks, Residential Flats of All Classes, Batsford, London 1905, pp.166–7, 43. 23. Ibid., p.51. 24. Ibid., p.52. 25. George Gissing, New Grub Street, Penguin, Harmondsworth 1968 (1891), Chapter 4; Wally Harwood, ‘A Walworth Boy: Looking back on growing up 1922–1939’, unpublished typescript 1977, Southwark Local Studies Library. 26. Reviewed in The Academy, 30 July 1881, p.97. 27. EM Forster, Howards End, Penguin, London 2000 (1910), Chapter XIII; Richard Dennis, ‘The Architecture of Hurry’ in K Gulliver and H Tóth (eds), Cityscapes in History, Ashgate, Farnham 2014, pp.115– 35. 28. TWH Crosland, The Suburbans, John Long, London 1905, pp.117– 18. 29. Richard Dennis, ‘Cornwall Mansions: The Rise and Fall of 7K and Its 207

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES Neighbours’, Gissing Journal, vol.44, no.4, 2008, pp.9–26. 30. Smith and White1876, p.464. 31. Charles Booth Police Notebook (LSE Archive), B358, 21 Dec. 1898, pp.98–9; Perks 1905, p.27; PF Mattheisen, AC Young and P Coustillas (eds), The Collected Letters of George Gissing, Vol.3, Ohio University Press, Athens Ohio, 1992, p.228. 32. ‘“Buildings” – “Mansions” – “Flats” – “Residences” – “Dwellings”’, The Builder, 12 Jan. 1878, pp.31–2 33. ‘Building in Flats for the Middle Classes in Camberwell’, The Builder, 10 Nov. 1877, p.1135 34. Charles Booth Police Notebook, B365, 3 July 1899, pp.187–9. 35. ‘Middle-Class Buildings in Flats in Kennington-Road’, The Builder, 23 March 1878, p.292; Charles Booth Police Notebook, B363, 8 June 1899, pp 234–5. 36. ‘Flats’, The Builder, 10 Nov. 1877, p.1138. 37. ‘A New House-in-flats’, The Builder, 23 Feb. 1878, p.187. 38. ‘Dwellings in Flats for the Middle and Labouring Classes’, The Builder, 24 June 1876, p.612. 39. Part of the development has been restored by One Housing: www.onehousing.co.uk/sites/default/files/Development%20 Portfolio%20-%20Interactive%20130115%20-%20reduced%20 size.pdf; for the gardens, see www.growingcommunities.org/ food-growing/patchwork-farm/eco-building-hire. An elegant but tiny (405 square feet) one-bedroom, top-floor flat in Allen Gardens, advertised for £400,000 in November 2015, was already sold subject to contract by 9 Dec. 2015: www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-53936909. html. A two-bedroom flat was advertised to let for £700 per week in April 2015: www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/ property-51738056.html (all sites accessed 9 Dec. 2015). 40. Isobel Watson, ‘The buildings of James Hartnoll’, Camden History Society Newsletter, no.58, March 1980; Isobel Watson, ‘Rebuilding London: Abraham Davis and his Brothers, 1881–1924’, London Journal, vol.29, no.1, 2004, pp.62–84. 41. JN Tarn, ‘The Improved Industrial Dwellings Company’, Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society, vol.22, 1968, pp.43–59; George Gissing, Will Warburton, Hogarth Press, London 1985 (1905); Charles Booth Police Notebook, B362, 20 Feb. 1899, pp.28–9. 42. Watson 1980; Philip Temple (ed.), Survey of London, vol.47, Northern Clerkenwell and Pentonville, Yale University Press, London 2008, Chapter 4, ‘Rosebery Avenue’, pp.109–39. 43. Watson 2004; St Pancras Medical Officer of Health Report, 1911, pp.169–76. 44. The Times, 16 March 1877, p.6; The Times, 26 March 1878, p.13; The Times, 13 June 1898, p.15 45. ‘City and West End Properties Limited’, The Times, 16 Dec. 1897, p.3. 46. ‘Consolidated London Properties Limited’, The Times, 1 Oct. 1898, p.4. 47. Residential Flats and Chambers to Let, n.d. (c.1910), City of Westminster Archives 48. ‘General Election candidates’, The Times, 27 June 1892, p.3; ‘Death 208

of Lord Rowton’, The Times, 10 Nov. 1903, p.14; ‘Obituary: Sir Richard Farrant’, The Times, 22 Nov. 1906, p.7; Museum of London, ‘Middle Class Dwellings Co. Ltd’, Ledger, 1888. 49. ‘Bloomsbury estate agent offers history lesson on Ridgmount Gardens’, 2011: www.frankharris.co.uk/latest-news/tag/ ridgmount (accessed 17 Dec. 2015). 50. Chris Hamnett and Bill Randolph, Cities, Housing and Profits: flat break-up and the decline of private renting, Hutchinson, London 1988, p.139. 51. Ibid., p.141. 52. ‘The London County Freehold and Leasehold Properties Limited’, The Times, 6 April 1925, p.21. 53. ‘London County Freehold and Leasehold Properties’, The Times, 19 Jan. 1927, p.21. 54. ‘London County Freehold and Leasehold Properties’, The Times, 20 April 1929, p.19. 55. ‘The London County Freehold and Leasehold Properties’, The Times, 12 April 1933, p.20. 56. London County Freehold & Leasehold Properties Ltd., The Illustrated Index to London’s Most Attractive Mansion Flats, 1932, booklet in Museum of London (Housing D1). 57. Ibid. 58. London County Freehold & Leasehold Properties Ltd., The Ideal London Home, 1933, booklet in Museum of London (Housing A3). 59. ‘New Headquarters of “Key-Flats”’, The Times, 21 Oct. 1938, p.11. 60. The Times, 25 Jan. 1911, p.22. 61. The Times, 3 March 1932, p.26. 62. Chris Hamnett and Bill Randolph, ‘The Rise and Fall of London’s Purpose-Built Blocks of Privately Rented Flats: 1853–1983’, London Journal, vol.11, no.2, 1985, p.162. 63. Ibid., p.160. 64. Hamnett and Randolph 1988, pp.111, 144–7. 65. Homes & Communities Agency, Build to Rent Fund – Continuous Market Engagement, 2015: www.gov.uk/government/uploads/ system/uploads/attachment_data/file/397523/Btr_CME_ Prospectus_full.pdf (accessed 12 Aug. 2016); British Property Federation, Build to Rent, 2015: www.bpf.org.uk/sites/default/ files/resources/BPF-Build-to-Rent-Welcome-to-the-UKs-newesthousing-sector.pdf (accessed 11 Aug. 2016). 66. See www.architecture.com/Explore/ExhibitionsandEvents/ AtHomeInBritain/AtHomeInBritain.aspx (accessed 12 Aug. 2016); ‘The Mecanoo Mansion at RIBA exhibition’, 2016: www.mecanoo. nl/News/ID/255/The-Mecanoo-Mansion-at-RIBA-exhibition-Athome-in-Britain (accessed 12 Aug. 2016).

CHAPTER FIVE 1. Bridget Cherry and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England, London 3: North-West, Penguin Books, London 1991, p.162. 2. Andrew Saint et al., London Suburbs, Merrell Holberton, London 1999, p.191.

REFERENCES 3. In 2002, SARAG co-chairs Kenneth Campbell and Lucia Otto attended a public lecture about characterisation by David Miles, then Chief Archaeologist at English Heritage. I am deeply grateful to Kenneth and Lucia and to others in South Acton for inspiration and insights across many years. 4. Marion Roberts et al., South Acton Estate: SARAG Master Plan Study, University of Westminster, March 2004. 5. English Heritage website, 2010: collections.europarchive.org/ tna/20100114124932/english-heritage.org.uk/server/show/ nav.1292 (accessed 17 Aug. 2016). 6. The Ealing Civic Society, through Bob Gurd and Adrian Cook, joined SARAG and English Heritage as a partner in planning the project. Further locally based help was supplied through the Acton History Group by David Knights and David Bays. 7. South Acton: Housing Histories – an historic environment characterisation study, English Heritage, Feb. 2005. 8. Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory, vol.1, Past and Present in Contemporary Culture, Verso, London 1994, pp.3–48. 9. For a notable exception, see ‘Municipal Dreams’: municipaldreams.wordpress.com (accessed 19 Sept. 2016). 10. See Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What happens after they’re built, Viking, New York 1994. 11. Stefan Muthesius, The English Terraced House, Yale University Press, London and New Haven 1982, pp.130–7. 12. Aileen Reid, Brentham: a history of the pioneer garden suburb, 1901–2001, Brentham Heritage Society, London 2000. 13. TFT Baker and CR Elrington (eds), A History of the County of Middlesex, vol.7, Victoria County History, London 1982, p.13. 14. Ealing Local History Centre, Reg Dunkling, South Acton, 1929–1939: a personal view, 2003, p.2. 15. The Times, 31 March 1956, p.8. 16. Patrick Abercrombie, 14 March 1944, quoted in Patricia L Garside, ‘Intergovernmental Relations and Housing Policy in London 1919–1970’, London Journal, vol.9, no.1, 1983, p.46. 17. Ealing Local History Centre, Acton Borough Council Minutes; Acton Gazette, 21 July 1950, p.1. 18. Acton Gazette, 1 Aug. 1952, p.4. 19. Acton Gazette, 10 Jan. 1947, p.2. 20. Acton Gazette, 3 Oct. 1952, p.1. 21. Bevan as quoted by Simon Parker in ‘From the Slums to the Suburbs: Labour Party Policy, the LCC, and the Woodberry Down Estate, Stoke Newington 1934–1961’, London Journal, vol.24, no.2, 1999, pp.51–69 (p.63); Simon Pepper, ‘The beginnings of high-rise social housing in the long 1940s: the case of the LCC and the Woodberry Down Estate’ in Mark Swenarton et al. (eds), Architecture and the Welfare State, Routledge, London 2015, pp.68–91; see also Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius, Tower Block: Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, Yale University Press, London and New Haven 1994, p.95. 22. Acton Borough Council Minutes.

23. Acton Gazette, 7 Feb. 1958, p.14. 24. Acton Gazette, 21 Feb. 1958, p.7. 25. Ealing Local History Centre, A/MB/H1/176. 26. Sylvia Brooks, Fluid interview, 28 Oct. 2004. 27. Acton Gazette, 17 June 1955, p.1. 28. Acton Gazette, 10 Feb. 1956, p.4. 29. Acton Gazette, 30 Sept. 1960, p.11. 30. Acton Borough Council Minutes. 31. Ealing Local History Centre; London Borough of Ealing Minutes, see also Colin Buchanan et al., Traffic in Towns: A study of the long-term problems of traffic in urban areas, Ministry of Transport, London 1963, p.19. 32. Acton Gazette, 1 July 1965, p.12. 33. Glendinning and Muthesius 1994, pp.35–51. 34. Anonymous resident, Acton Gazette, 1 Aug. 1963, p.2. 35. Anonymous resident, Acton Gazette, 22 Aug. 1963, p.2. 36. London Borough of Ealing Minutes. 37. Fluid interview, 2 Nov. 2004. 38. Alison Ravetz, Council Housing and Culture: the history of a social experiment, Routledge, London 2001, pp.97–8. 39. Information kindly supplied by Kenneth Campbell and Lucia Otto, 2004; Peter Kentish, Fluid interview, 2 Nov. 2004. 40. Acton Gazette, 15 March 1973, p.1. 41. Acton Gazette, 17 Oct. 1974, p.5. 42. Ray Forrest and Alan Murie, ‘Residualisation and Council Housing: Aspects of the Changing Social Relations of Housing Tenure’, Journal of Social Policy, vol.12, no.4, Oct. 1983, pp.453–68. 43. Ealing Local History Centre, Simon Morris, A Report on the South Acton Estate, 1977. 44. Colin Ward, Housing: an anarchist approach, Freedom Press, London 1975, pp.158, 161. 45. South Acton News, March 2004, p.3. 46. Celestina Uzoka, Fluid interview, 28 Oct. 2004. 47. Anne Bonner, Fluid interview, 28 Oct. 2004. 48. Fluid, South Acton Stories, Fluid 2005. 49. John Gashion, ‘Chronological Housing History – South Acton Estate’, Feb. 2003. 50. Stik, quoted at www.hta.co.uk/news/posts/south-acton-mural (accessed 17 Aug. 2016), and The Guardian, 11 Aug. 2015; see also Jack Fogg (ed.), Stik, Century, London 2015. 51. Celestina Uzoka, Fluid interview, 1 Nov. 2004. 52. Interview with Bertilla Cappelletti, 28 May 2015. 53. Gareth Evans, as quoted by Iain Sinclair, London Review of Books, 6 Nov. 2014, p.47. 54. John Ruskin, ‘The Lamp of Memory’, in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, Noonday Press, New York 1974 (1848), p.170.

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CHAPTER SIX 1. Ruth Glass (ed.), London: Aspects of Change, MacGibbon and Kee, London 1964, p.18. 2. Steen Eiler Rasmussen, London: The Unique City, Jonathan Cape, London 1937. 3. London Metropolitan Archives, E/NOR/04/096, ‘Particular of Leases granted under Mr Charles Hamor Hill’s Agreement dated 7th April 1837 of property at Canonbury’. 4. Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick NJ 1989. 5. Census Enumerator Returns, 1871. 6. Charles Booth, ‘Descriptive Map of London Poverty 1889’, in Life and Labour of the People in London, Williams and Norgate, London 1889–91. 7. From 1901 to 1921 the population of inner London dropped by 51,744 while that of outer London rose by 950,543. HMSO, Census of England and Wales, County of London, 1921, London 1923. 8. Islington Gazette, 10 July 1934. 9. Ross McKibbin, Ideologies of Class, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1991, pp.267, 285. 10. Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth 1957, p.33. 11. The Times, 22 April 1932, p.24. 12. The Times, 11 July 1960, p.14. 13. The Times, 12 Oct. 1936, p.24. 14. Islington Housing Committee Minutes, 3 Sept. 1931 and 1 Oct. 1931. 15. Islington Housing Committee Minutes, 27 June and 25 July 1919. 16. Islington Housing Committee Minutes, 4 April 1928. 17. Islington Housing Committee Minutes, 7 April 1938. 18. North London Press, 17 May 1968. 19. Sunday Times, 16 April 1972, p.61. 20. Ibid. 21. ‘Canonbury Estate, Islington N.1’, Official Architect, vol.14, Jan. 1951, pp.34–5 22. The London Gazette, 13 April 1951, p.2075. 23. PR Williams, ‘The Role of Institutions in the inner London Housing market: the case of Islington’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, vol.1, no.1, 1976, p.74. 24. The Times, 28 Feb. 1968, p.12. 25. The Times, 4 Aug. 1937, p.18. 26. The Times, 5 July 1938, p.14. 27. P Scott, The Property Masters: A History of the British Commercial Property Sector, Taylor & Francis, London 2013, pp.123–6. 28. The Observer, 10 Dec. 1961, p.5. 29. The Observer, 16 July 1961, p.4. 30. Harley Sherlock, An Architect in Islington, The Islington Society,

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London 2006, p.19. 31. Architect and Building News, vol.202, no.4378, 20 Nov. 1952, pp.608–9 and vol. 216, no.5, 9 Sept. 1959, pp.145–8. 32. The Observer, 28 Feb. 1965, p.35. 33. HMSO, Report of the Committee on Housing in Greater London, Cmd. 2605, London 1965, pp.424–5. 34. The Guardian, 25 Aug. 1966, p.11. 35. The Times, 15 Feb. 1969, p.11. 36. The Guardian, 2 Dec. 1961, p.6. 37. The Architects’ Journal, vol.143, no.1, 5 Jan. 1966, p.10. 38. The Observer, 28 Feb. 1965, p.35. 39. Daily Herald, 28 Dec. 1960. 40. The Architects’ Journal, vol.155, no.14, 5 April 1972, pp.704–6. 41. The Guardian, 28 Nov. 1970, p.11. 42. The Times, 5 Feb. 1972, p.15. 43. The Times, 9 Jan. 1973, p.14. 44. The Times, 23 Oct. 1973, p.2. 45. Ideal Home, vol.100, Jan. 1971, pp.17–21. 46. Ibid., p.20. 47. Ibid., p.78.

CHAPTER SEVEN 1. I am grateful to the staffs of the London Metropolitan Archives, the Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, the City of Westminster Archives Centre and the University of Liverpool Library Special Collections for their friendly assistance. Thanks also to Professor Mark Swenarton and Peter Guillery for constructive comments. 2. David Cameron, ‘I’ve put the bulldozing of sink estates at the heart of turnaround Britain’, Sunday Times, 10 Jan. 2016; Editorial, ‘Sinking Estates’, The Times, 11 Jan. 2016; ‘Worst sink estates to get £140m funding’, The Times, 11 Jan. 2016. For a balanced review of the options, Claire Bennie, ‘Managing the Estates,’ RIBA Journal, March 2016, pp.50–2. 3. New London Architecture, London Tall Buildings Survey, Annual Update, March 2016, p.3 defines tall buildings as 20 storeys or more. In February 2016, the survey identified 436 tall buildings ‘in the pipeline’, of which 89 were under construction, 233 in approved schemes but not yet on site, and 114 in proposed schemes (including 39 in pre-application), as well as 19 completions (see p.4 and fig.3). 60% were 20–29 storeys, and 6% over fifty storeys (p.5); primary use of tall buildings was 73% residential (slightly down on the 83% residential in the 2015 survey). In uncertain times it is more difficult than ever to predict how many of the approved schemes will go into construction. 4. The National Archives, HLG/101/258B, Unhealthy Areas Committee (Neville Chamberlain, Chairman), Meeting 24 March 1920, Document 48: Women House Managers provided ‘ample evidence of the preference of all families for cottages.’ See also the (patronising) report of a riotous 1925 public inquiry into the

REFERENCES proposed redevelopment of the Limehouse Fields slums, with 10-storey maisonettes (eventually unbuilt). The objectors, The Architects’ Journal told its readers, were ‘passionately attached to their poor little homes, and are strongly prejudiced against block dwellings, where they would not be able to keep pigeons, fowls and rabbits, in “a bit of back garden.” A 10-storey flat, such as that proposed for them, they regard with aversion’: see ‘Housing Trouble at Stepney,’ The Architects’ Journal, 19 Aug. 1925. Little has changed: Richard Hoggart, The Way We Live Now, Pimlico, London 1995, p.14: ‘Whether we like it or not, English families do not like living in tenement blocks.’ 5. Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius, Tower Block: Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, Yale University Press, London and New Haven 1994, Table 5, p.335. See also a fundamental source in this field, Patrick Dunleavy, The Politics of Mass Housing in Britain, 1945–1975, Clarendon, Oxford 1981. 6. Glendinning and Muthesius 1994, Table 3, p.333. 7. Ibid., Table 4, p.334. 8. London County Council (hereafter LCC), Council Minutes, 21 Jan. 1958, pp.6–7. 9. See Elain Harwood’s themed entry ‘The LCC Architects Department c.1940–1965’ in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 10. London Metropolitan Archives, LCC/CL/TP/1/35: WE Jackson to Eric Salmon (30 June 1942) reminds the Clerk to the LCC of the earlier approach after which ‘you lunched with Sir Parker Morris and fobbed him off’. 11. London Metropolitan Archives, LCC/AR/TP/1/54 (22 Aug. 1941): Forshaw’s County Plan team briefing. 12. This section draws on material published in greater detail in Simon Pepper, ‘The Beginnings of High-Rise Social Housing in the Long 1940s: The Case of the LCC and the Woodberry Down Estate,’ in Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel (eds), Architecture and the Welfare State, Routledge, London and New York 2015, pp.75–80. 13. London Metropolitan Archives, LCC/AR/TP/1/54 (2 Feb. 1942): Leader’s meeting with Abercrombie and Forshaw following presentation of Preliminary London Plan. Latham, Silkin and others wanted even higher densities to maintain central population. Longer term priorities would soon revert to dispersal. See Andrew Saint, ‘ “Spread the People”: the LCC’s Dispersal Policy, 1889– 1965’, in Andrew Saint (ed.), Politics and the People of London: the London County Council 1889–1965, Hambledon Press, London and Ronceverte 1989, pp.215–36. 14. The Development Plan Review of 1960 extended the 200ppa zone and introduced an intermediate zone of 175ppa. Dunleavy 1981, pp.70–1. 15. London Metropolitan Archives, LCC/AR/TP/1/54, Meeting notes (20 Nov. 1941). 16. JH Forshaw and Patrick Abercrombie, County of London Plan, LCC, London 1943, p.119. 17. Mixed development is expounded upon in Elizabeth Denby, Europe Rehoused, George Allen & Unwin, London 1938, pp.263–4. See also Ruth Owens, ‘Mixed Development in Local Authority Housing in

England and Wales, 1945–1970’, PhD thesis, London University 1987. 18. London Metropolitan Archives, LCC/MIN/11566, Town Planning Committee, Presented Papers (19 Dec. 1944): item 17 is a massive dossier recording feedback. 19. London Metropolitan Archives, LCC/AR/TP/1/54, Administrative County of London (Development Plan): Sub-Committee reviewing feedback in 1950–1. 20. Miles Glendinning, Modern Architect: The Life and Times of Robert Matthew, RIBA, London 2008, p.117 notes that Matthew orchestrated the campaign; Lionel Esher, A Broken Wave: The Rebuilding of England 1940–1980, Penguin, London 1981, pp.103–4 credits J. M. Richards at The Architectural Review. For this see JM Richards, Memoirs of an Unjust Fella: An Autobiography, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London 1980, pp.237–8. 21. For a balanced account see Nicholas Bullock, Building the Post-War World: Modern Architecture and Reconstruction in Britain, Routledge, London and New York 2002. 22. Glendinning and Muthesius 1994, p.3 emphasises ‘the receptivity of powerful LCC figures such as Evelyn Dennington to “progressive” design ideals. As a result the LCC were in the remarkable position of enjoying both professional power and political backing.’ 23. London Metropolitan Archives, 28.75WOO/571394, press release. 24. Overview in Elain Harwood, Space, Hope and Brutalism: English Architecture 1945–1975, Yale University Press for Historic England, London and New Haven 2015, pp.59–63; and Philip Temple (ed.), Survey of London, vol 47, Northern Clerkenwell and Pentonville, Yale University Press for English Heritage, London and New Haven 2008. For contemporary surveys, see Lionel Brett, ‘Post-War Flats in Britain,’ The Architectural Review, Nov. 1949, pp.315–22, and Walter Segal (compiler), ‘Housing for London,’ Architectural Design, Nov. 1948, pp.229–43. Micro-housing-histories of the boroughs of Shoreditch, Hackney, Stoke Newington and Lambeth appear in Alexi Marmot, ‘How High Should They Live?: The Role of Architects and Planners in the Design of High-Rise Housing in England and Wales’, PhD, University of California, Berkeley, 1984, and in recent volumes of the Survey of London covering Poplar, Woolwich and Battersea. 25. Marmot 1984, p.64. 26. For the competition decision, see Westminster City Council, Minutes, 20 April 1944, pp.61–4; for its arrangements, Minutes, 25 Jan. 1945, pp.15–16. Westminster originally wanted to re-plan 86 acres, an area more than twice the size of the competition site, extending north almost to Victoria. 27. For a technical account, see ‘Flats in Pimlico: Discussion between the Architects and the Editors’, The Architects’ Journal, 7 Dec. 1950, pp.488–91. 28. Westminster City Council, Architectural Competition for Pimlico Housing Scheme: Conditions of the Competition, 12 Oct. 1945, pp.12–13. The overall density was to be 200ppa, with a maximum height of 10 storeys; but a density of 300ppa was allowed for not more than eight acres. 29. For the pre-war work of Davidge and Ramsey see Simon Pepper 211

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES and Peter Richmond, ‘Stepney and the Politics of High Rise Housing – Limehouse Fields to John Scurr House, 1925–1938’, London Journal, vol.34, no.1, March 2009, pp.35–54. 30. Editorial, Westminster & Pimlico News, 28 June 1946. 31. Editorial, Westminster & Pimlico News, 1 Nov. 1946. 32. Ibid. 33. John Summerson, ‘A piece of new London,’ New Statesman and Nation, 29 Dec.1951, p.755; Lewis Mumford, ‘Follies of Modern Architecture,’ The Architects’ Journal, 9 July 1953, p.561, a lecture in which Mumford told Architectural Association students of a ‘backward step’. See also Henry-Russell Hitchcock, ‘Pimlico: An Assessment of Westminster City Council’s Churchill Gardens,’ The Architectural Review, Sept. 1953, pp.176–84, which focused on formal architectural values. Was Hitchcock’s article commissioned as a rejoinder to Summerson and Mumford? 34. Matthew’s staff probably started work on Ackroyden before the official return of housing design responsibilities to the Architect’s Department. Photographs of a very realistic model were published in The Architects’ Journal, 7 Dec. 1950, p.477. 35. Nikolaus Pevsner, ‘Roehampton: LCC Housing and the Picturesque Tradition,’ The Architectural Review Vol.126, 1959, pp.21–35. 36. ‘Loughborough Road, Lambeth’, The Architects’ Journal, 7 Aug. 1952, pp.157–8; model illustrated, see The Architects’ Journal, 31 July 1952, p.127; for ‘Bentham Road, Hackney’, The Architects’ Journal, 3 June 1954, pp.676–7. 37. Anne Saunders (ed.), The London County Council Bomb Damage Maps 1939–1945, London Topographical Society Publications, London 2005: plates 63–65 cover the Stepney–Poplar area; losses are given in Table V, p.22. 38. London Metropolitan Archives, LCC/CL/HSG/2/50, Stepney– Poplar Reconstruction Area, passim. Other housing bodies included the Metropolitan Police, the Mercers’ Company, the Guinness and Peabody Trusts, the Commercial Gas Company and the (American) Presbyterian Housing Limited, a charity. 39. Report (6 Oct. 1943) of Housing and Public Health Committee, LCC Minutes, 16 Nov. 1943. Site acquisitions are noted on p.290. 40. London Metropolitan Archives, LCC/CL/HSG/2/50, Reports by Architect (4 April and 11 July 1944). 41. LCC Minutes, 6 Feb. 1945, p.744. 42. Devons Estate in LCC Minutes, 29 July 1947, pp.542–3; St Paul’s Way revisions approved in LCC, Minutes 17 May 1949, pp.304–5. Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (hereafter THLHLA), L/THL/D/1/1/18 for the Ocean Estate 1937–59. See also Christopher Chamont, The Ocean: A Short History of the Ocean Housing Estate in Stepney from 1937 to 2004, Ragged School Museum Trust, London 2004. On the steel shortage, see LCC Minutes, 9 Oct. 1951, pp.588–9. 43. The best account is to be found in Stephen Porter (ed.), Survey of London, vol.43, Poplar, Blackwall and the Isle of Dogs, Athlone Press, London 1994, Chapter II: ‘Public Housing in Poplar’, pp.21–54. 44. Letter from Brian Smith, The Architects’ Journal, 6 July 1950, p.61. Smith’s views are echoed in JM Richards, ‘Lansbury’, The 212

Architectural Review, Dec. 1951, pp.361–7. 45. Percy Johnson-Marshall, Rebuilding Cities, The University Press, Edinburgh 1966, p.222. 46. Bridget Cherry, Charles O’Brien and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England, London 5: East, Yale University Press, London and New Haven 2005, p.461. 47. Approval of St Anne’s, LCC Minutes, 2 Nov. 1954, pp.613–4; on rent setting, etc, see Minutes, 9 Oct. 1956, p.519. Rents were normally set just prior to completion. 48. THLHLA, L/THL/D/1/131, the former LCC Alton Street project file, letter to the Clerk to the Council (LCC) from the Town Clerk (Poplar MBC), 6 Jan. 1956; see also London Metropolitan Archives, LCC/ CL/HSG/1/94 for correspondence to April 1956. 49. ‘High Flats: Further London Development,’ The Builder, 30 Nov. 1956, p.940. 50. Alan Powers (ed.), Robin Hood Gardens Re-Visions, The Twentieth Century Society, London 2010. 51. Report of the Town Planning Committee, LCC Minutes, 15 May 1956, pp.286–8. 52. ‘High Paddington’, Architect and Building News, 23 Oct. 1952, pp.479–82 was the key initial publication. The journal also published a booklet on the scheme. 53. Peter Eadie, ‘Built High to Clear the Slums’, Picture Post, 12 March 1955, pp.22–4. 54. The Times, 19 Nov. 1979, obituary of Lord Allan DSO OBE (1914– 79), Conservative MP South Paddington 1951–66, Parliamentary Private Secretary to Eden and Macmillan, junior minister Admiralty and Foreign Office, Party Treasurer, Life Peer 1973. 55. PA Hannen, of Holland & Hannen and Cubitts Ltd, was committee secretary. Companies represented included Freeman and James (Structural Engineers), Willment Brothers (excavation), Williams and Williams (cladding), Matthew Hall (sanitation and services) and Weygood-Otis (lifts). G Mansell, Assistant Editor of the Architect and Building News was Public Relations Officer for the committee. 56. Dunleavy 1981, p.109. 57. Editorial Notes’, Town Planning Review, Jan. 1953, pp.255–6; Sir William Holford, ‘An Adventure in Architecture’, The Listener, 12 Feb. 1953, pp.257–9. 58. Criticism by Stephen Gardiner, The Architects’ Journal, 27 Nov. 1952, p.637; Pevsner’s reply, The Architects’ Journal. 11 Dec. 1952, p.696. 59. London Metropolitan Archives, LCC/CL/HSG/1/94, Letters of Kadleigh to LCC (23 Oct. 1952); Ernest Marples, MP to Councillor AR Stamp, Chairman, LCC Town Planning committee (26 March 1953); joint report Chief Engineer and Architect to LCC Housing and Planning Committees Hg. 569 and TP. 342 (11 Nov. 1954); architects interviewed by joint meeting of committees (7 Feb. 1955); final report in LCC Minutes, 15 March 1955, p.137. 60. The Times, 12 March 1953, p.8. 61. ‘Report of a Symposium on High Buildings,’ The Architects’ Journal, 7 Dec. 1954, pp.815–17. 62. Illuminated model, The Architects’ Journal, 7 April 1955, p.458.

REFERENCES Drawings in ‘New Barbican,’ The Architects’ Journal. 14 Oct. 1954, pp.457–66. In a lecture to the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, Anstey described underground industry and warehousing above which ‘perhaps at 100 ft, and supported only on transparent columns, would rise a grove of mansions, tall, widely spaced, compounded of glass and aluminium interconnected with a filigree of swiftly moving ways, from the tops of which the smooth sky ships would moor and move. At ground level, why should there not be cool walks, opening to glades where flowers bloomed the year round?’ The Times, 3 May 1955, p.6. 63. Johnson-Marshall 1966, p.266. 64. The Architects’ Journal, 26 Feb. 1953, pp.278–80. 65. On Bellamy’s LCC service, see London Metropolitan Archives, GLC/ AR/DA/02; for his civil service career: Imperial Calendar and Civil Service Yearbook. 66. AA Bellamy, ‘High Flats in the United States of America,’ The Builder, 27 Dec. 1957, p.1132; ‘High Flats in the USA,’ Housing Review, Jan.–Feb. 1958, pp.12–18; ‘Housing in Large Cities in the USA,’ Town Planning Review, Oct. 1958, pp.179–97. 67. University of Liverpool Library, Special Collections and Archives, D113/8/73, Forshaw Papers for typescript reports from Alec A Bellamy, Commonwealth Fund Fellow 1956–7, First Report: ‘High Apartment Buildings in Low Rent Housing in the USA’ (Whitehall, 1957) with covering letters to Forshaw dates 4 Dec. 1957, 22 April and 7 May 1958; D113/8/77 for Second Report: ‘Housing in Large Cities in the USA’ (Whitehall, 1958). 68. Manchester Guardian, 13 Dec. 1952, p.10. 69. DL Munby, Industry and Planning in Stepney. A Report presented to the Stepney Reconstruction Group, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1951. 70. Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1957, pp.165–6. 71. The Times, 8 May 1957, p.11; for the leader, see The Times, 26 April 1957. 72. The Times, 26 April 1957. 73. Peter Hennessy, Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties, Penguin, London 2007, pp.494–5. 74. THLHLA, Poplar MBC, Council Minutes, 6 Feb. 1949, p.72: appointment of architects for 104 maisonettes in an eight-storey block. Currie House was built on a sloping site and was eight storeys at one end and nine at the other. 75. ‘Currie House and Dunkeld House,’ The Builder, 29 Jan. 1954, pp.213–7; also Architect & Building News, 11 March 1954 and Municipal Journal, 12 March 1954. 76. The Builder, 5 May 1952, p.217. 77. ‘Councillor P. Connolly scotches a pernicious rumour – no question of Council being unable to find tenants for new flats’, East End News, 8 Jan. 1954. 78. LMA, LCC/CL/HSG/1/94, Minutes of meeting 10 Jan. 1956. 79. THLHLA, L/THL/D/1/1/151, Poplar Town Clerk to Clerk to the LCC (6 Feb. 1956). The original LCC file was transferred to the London Borough of Tower Hamlets when the GLC was abolished.

80. THLHLA, L/THL/D/1/1/151, LCC Clerk to Poplar Town Clerk (23 Feb. 1956). 81. THLHLA, L/THL/D/1/1/151, Meeting notes 6 Sept. 1956. 82. RIBA Symposium on High Flats, RIBA, London, 1955, p.43. Forshaw was at this time still the serving Chief Architect Ministry of Housing and Local Government (MHLG) and on this matter challenged Whitfield Lewis, a future Chief Architect MHLG. 83. Described in AW Cleeve Barr, Public Authority Housing, Batsford, London 1958, pp.187–90. 84. THLHLA, L/THL/D/1/1/151, John Shove (LCC committee clerk) to Hamilton (Town Clerk of Poplar) informing the borough that the MHLG would not agree informal arbitration (15 Oct. 1956). Letter from R Brain (MHLG) to LCC Clerk (29 Oct. 1956) calling-in the scheme. 85. HLHLA, L/THL/D/1/1/151, proof of evidence for Johnson Marshall. 86. ‘Battle of the Skyscraper Flats,’ Evening News, 27 Nov. 1956. 87. THLHLA, L/THL/D/1/1/151, R Brain (MHLG) to the LCC Clerk (6 Feb. 1957). See also ‘19-storey Housing Approved: Minister Over-Rules Poplar Objection’, The Times, 8 Feb. 1957, and ‘19-storey Flats for Poplar’, Evening News, 7 Feb. 1957. 88. News Chronicle, 16 March 1956. 89. East London Advertiser, 8 Feb. 1957. 90. THLHLA, L/THL/D/1/1/151, Minute to Principal Housing Architect (22 Jan. 1957). After the inquiry the LCC expected an appeal from Poplar and rushed the technical approvals. 91. Dunleavy 1981, pp.205–34; see also Nicholas Bullock, ‘West Ham and the Welfare State 1945–1970: A Suitable Case for Treatment’, in Swenarton et al. (eds), Architecture and the Welfare State, pp.92– 110. D Rigby Childs with Jack Whittle, ‘Post-War Housing in West Ham’, The Architects’ Journal, 27 Sept. 1956, p.463 notes the locals’ dislike of flats; Whittle was Deputy Borough Architect of West Ham and a future Deputy Chief Architect at the LCC. 92. Dunleavy 1981, pp.234–54. 93. For a report on the implications of the disaster for the GLC and the lessons to be drawn from the Griffiths Report, see GLC, Minutes, 17 Dec. 1968, pp.736–7. 94. Dominic Sandbrook, White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties, Little, Brown, London 2006, pp.619–40. 95. Peter Guillery (ed.), Survey of London, vol. 48, Woolwich, London 2012, pp.320–4, for Morris Walk constructed 1962–6. 96. Dates and figures from Glendinning and Muthesius 1994, Gazetteer 1. 97. Hide Tower approved in Westminster City Council, Minutes, 3 Dec. 1957, p.270. 98. In 1965 Westminster absorbed Paddington and with it Jensen’s legacy of high-rise flats. Westminster’s biggest problem, however, was the medium-rise Mozart Estate, with the linked walkways so heavily criticised in Alice Coleman, Utopia on Trial: Vision and Reality in Planned Housing, 2nd edn, Hilary Shipman, London 1990, pp.135–48. The book first appeared in 1985 to exceptionally hostile reviews from the architectural press. 99. Competition conditions printed in Westminster City Council, 213

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES Minutes, 15 Dec. 1960, pp.281–2. Darbourne’s scheme achieved 200ppa with blocks ranging from three to eight storeys in height. See also Philip Powell’s competition assessor’s report in Westminster City Council, Minutes, 12 Oct. 1961, pp.202–6. 100. Mark Swenarton, ‘Developing a New Format for Urban Housing: Neave Brown and the Design of Camden’s Fleet Road Estate’, Journal of Architecture, vol.17, no.6, 2012, pp.907–1007. 101. ‘Royal Visitors in the East End’, The Times, 19 July 1962, p.4. 102. Johnson-Marshall 1966, p.240 (captions to figs.67 and 68). 103. A rare exception was Tarling Heights (later re-named Kelday Heights) a new nineteen-storey social-housing block opened in 2008 on part of the post-war LCC Tarling Estate. 104. Esher 1981, p.131. 105. Cmnd. 3602, Old Houses into New Homes, Ministry of Housing and Local Government, HMSO, April 1968, p.1. 106. See Cmnd.2838, The Housing Programme 1965 to 1970, Ministry of Housing and Local Government, HMSO, Nov. 1965, for Labour’s wider plans just before the half-million pledge. See also David Donnison, The Government of Housing, Penguin, London 1967, pp.247ff. 107. Richard Crossman, The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, vol.1, Minister of Housing 1964–66, Hamish Hamilton and Jonathan Cape, London 1975, p.124, entry for Thursday 7 Jan. 1965. The day before, Crossman had enjoyed ‘a very gay lunch with The Architects’ Journal and The Architectural Review’, the principal organs promoting Modernist housing architecture. His hosts would have been shocked.

CHAPTER EIGHT 1. Peter Golds, ‘Towers of London’, Conservative Home, 2013:www. conservativehome.com/localgovernment/2013/11/towers-oflondon.html (accessed 17 Jan. 2016); LBC Radio, ‘Balfron Tower: Eyesore or Landmark?’, 14 Aug. 2015: www.lbc.co.uk/balfrontower-eyesore-or-landmark-114623 (accessed 17 Jan. 2016). 2. Adrian Forty, ‘Being or Nothingness: Private Experience and Public Architecture in Post-War Britain’, Architectural History, vol.38, 1995, pp.25–35. 3. Ibid., p.28. 4. Two decades later, a growing body of scholarship is dedicated to this actual question of failure, as it is so regularly invoked as grounds for demolition of post-war housing estates, in turn severing kinship networks as families and communities are dispersed. 5. 28 Days Later, dir. Danny Boyle (2002). 6. Blitz, dir. Elliott Lester (2011). 7. Shopping, dir. Paul WS Anderson (1994). 8. Ibid. 9. Ben Campkin, Remaking London, IB Taurus, London 2013, p.100. 10. Gareth Roberts, ‘National Trust adopts “Britain’s ugliest building” as star attraction for two-week architecture tour’, Mirror, 24 Sept. 2014. 11. Eddy Frankel, ‘What’s the storey?’, Time Out, 26 May 2015. 214

12. Chris Pleasance, ‘Step back in time with the original Goldfinger: Flat in the 60s towerblock designed by architect who gave Bond baddy his name is lovingly recreated’, Daily Mail, 27 Sept. 2014. 13. Melanie Wright, ‘Personal finance? We can teach you a thing or two’, Sunday Times, 5 Oct. 2014; LBC Radio2015; Roberts, ‘National Trust’; Louise Jury, ‘National Trust opens Sixties flat in ‘Britain’s ugliest building’’, Evening Standard, 26 Sept. 2014. 14. Anon., ‘Tower block tours give “Brutalism” a closer look’, Agence France Presse, 30 Sept. 2014. 15. Simon Jenkins, ‘Betjeman and Pevsner taught us how to see’, The Times, 17 March 2000. 16. Reyner Banham, The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic?, Reinhold, New York 1966. 17. Ike Ijeh, ‘A look back at 1963 – the year of the Beatles, sexual politics and tower blocks’, Building, 2 May 2013. 18. Paul Waugh, ‘Watchdog study to expose asbestos-ridden flats’, Evening Standard, 30 May 1997; Tom Parry, ‘13.5m Live in a Britain Where Parents Face a Choice: Feed Their Children or Keep Them Warm at Night’, Mirror, 19 Sept. 2011; Hannah Ellis-Petersen, ‘Decaying east London tower block to house 12-hour Macbeth production’, The Guardian, 19 June 2014. 19. Jess Bowie, ‘Painting exhibition of Goldfinger’s other modernist tower’, The Architects’ Journal, 16 Jan. 2009; Parry 2011. 20. Charlotte Bell and Katie Beswick, ‘Authenticity and Representation: Council Estate Plays at the Royal Court’, New Theatre Quarterly, vol.30, no.2, May 2014, pp.120–35 (p.132). 21. Nigel Warburton, Ernő Goldfinger: The Life of an Architect, Routledge, London 2005. 22. Neil Cameron, ‘Understanding Ernő’, The Architects’ Journal, vol.220, no.2, 2004, p.44. 23. Michael Freeden, ‘The Stranger at the Feast: Ideology and Public Policy in 20th Century Britain’, 20th Century British History, vol.1, no.1, 1990, pp.9–34. Cited in Elizabeth Darling, Re-Forming Britain: Narratives of Modernity before Reconstruction, Routledge, London 2007, p.5. 24. Andrew Higgott, Mediating Modernism: Architectural Cultures in Britain, Routledge, London 2007, p.15. 25. Kenneth Powell, World Cities: London, The University of Michigan, Michigan 1993, p.15. 26. Elain Harwood and Andrew Saint, London, HMSO Books, London 1991, pp.107–9. 27. Bridget Cherry, Charles O’Brien and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England, London 5: East, Yale University Press, London and New Haven 2005, pp.656–7. 28. Alan Powers, ‘Ernő Goldfinger’ in Maxwell Hutchinson (ed.), The Architects Who Made London, The Royal Academy, London 2009. 29. Owen Hatherley, A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys Through Urban Britain, Verso, London 2012, p.29 30. Hilary French, Key Urban Housing of the Twentieth Century: Plans Sections and Elevations, Laurence King, London 2008, pp.138–9. 31. James Dunnett and Gavin Stamp, Ernő Goldfinger: Works 1,

REFERENCES Architectural Association, London 1983, p.7. 32. James Dunnett, ‘Ernő Goldfinger: The Architect as Constructor’, The Architectural Review, vol.173, April 1983, pp.42–8. 33. English Heritage, ‘List entry summary: Balfron Tower, St Leonards Road’, 1996: www.balfrontower.org/document/16/list-entrysummary-balfron-tower-st-leonards-road (accessed 17 Jan. 2016). 34. Martin O’Rourke, ‘The Lansbury Estate, Keeling House and Balfron Tower: Conservation issues and the architecture of social intent’ in Susan MacDonald (ed.), Preserving post-war heritage: The care and conservation of mid-twentieth century architecture, Donhead Publishing, Shaftesbury 2001, pp.169–76. 35. Owen Hatherley, ‘Lesser Known Architecture’, Design Museum, 2013. 36. Warburton 2005, pp.157–62. 37. Ruth Oldham, ‘Ursula Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower Diary and Notes’, C20 Society, Autumn 2010, pp.22–3. 38. See Archive material held at the RIBA British Architectural Library, Drawings and Archives Collections: Gol/Er/170/6-7; Gol/ Er/171/1-12; Gol/Er/391/1; PB667/1; PB688/1-2; PB752/1; PB1086/2; PB1087/1; PB1090/6; PB2062/2. 39. Ernő Goldfinger, quoted in Anon, ‘Finding the high life in Poplar’, The Guardian, 14 Feb. 1968. 40. Ernő Goldfinger, quoted in ‘High living sampled by architect’, Daily Telegraph, 23 Feb. 1968. 41. Ernő Goldfinger, quoted in ‘East End’s tallest block of flats make “ideal homes”’, East London Advertiser, 1 March 1968. 42. Editorial, ‘Out of touch’, The Architect & Building News, 6 March 1968, p.353. 43. RIBA BAL, GolEr 391/1, Ursula Goldfinger, ‘General Report, Balfron Tower’, 1968. 44. RIBA BAL, GolEr 391/1, Ernő Goldfinger, ‘Rowlett Street Housing Press Report’, 13 May 1968. 45. Ibid. 46. Dunnett 1983. 47. Ibid. 48. London Borough of Tower Hamlets, ‘Formal consultation on the proposed regeneration and transfer of the East India Area to Poplar HARCA’, 2006, p.23. 49. ‘Consultation undertaken has shown that approximately half of the residents in the two blocks [Balfron Tower and Carradale House] said that they would prefer to move out’, which suggests approximately half would prefer to stay put – around 117 households between the two buildings. London Borough of Tower Hamlets 2006, p.23. See also London Borough of Tower Hamlets, ‘Estate Monitoring Freedom of Information request’, 2010, p.2. 50. Jane Rendell, Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism, IB Tauris, London 2010; Heike Roms and Rebecca Edwards, ‘Oral History as Site-Specific Practice: Locating the History of Performance Art in Wales’, in Shelley Trower (ed.), Place, Writing and Voice in Oral History, Palgrave Macmillan, London 2011, pp.171–192; Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical

Reenactment, Routledge, London 2011; Jen Harvie, Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism, Palgrave Macmillan, London 2013. I have written elsewhere about the methodological approach to these re-enactments. See David Roberts, ‘Housing Acts’ in Andrew Filmer and Juliet Rufford (eds), Performing Architectures: Contemporary Projects, Practices and Pedagogies, Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, London 2017. 51. See Passionate Rationalism: Recollections of Ernö Goldfinger, British Library and National Trust, London 2004. 52. Docomomo-UK is the UK branch of the international UNESCOrecognised non-profit organisation for Documentation and Conservation of Buildings, Sites and Neighbourhoods of the Modern Movement. 53. I have anonymised excerpts from residents’ testimonies for the protection of freedom of expression. 54. London Borough of Tower Hamlets, Application PA/15/02554, 2015. 55. David Roberts, Balfron Tower: a building archive, 2015: www. balfrontower.org (accessed 17 Jan. 2016). 56. Oliver Wainwright, ‘Revealed: how developers exploit flawed planning system to minimize affordable housing’, The Guardian, 25 June 2015. 57. Roberts 2015. 58. Avanti Architects, ‘Conservation Management Plan: The Brownfield Estate, Poplar’, 2007. 59. Richard Coleman, ‘Balfron Tower: Heritage Significance Report’, 2015, p.44. 60. Ibid., p.45. 61. Nudge Factory, ‘Balfron Tower: Statement of Community Involvement’, 2015, pp.4–5. 62. Londonewcastle, ‘Joint Venture announced to give iconic Balfron Tower a new lease of life’, 2014. 63. Studio Egret West, ‘Balfron Tower: Design and Access Statement’, 2015, p.18. 64. Emma Dent Coad, ‘Conserving Living Buildings’, in Ben Campkin, David Roberts and Rebecca Ross (eds), Urban Pampleteer 2: Regeneration Realities, Belmont Press, Northampton 2013, pp.5-6. 65. James Dunnett, ‘Brownfield Estate: Grade 2* Listing Nomination Reasons Text’, 2014, p.1. 66. David Roberts, ‘Residents’ Experiences of Balfron Tower’, 2014. 67. Owen Hatherley, ‘Listing Upgrade Supporting Statement’, 2014, p.1. 68. David Roberts, ‘Report in objection to proposal PA/15/02554’, 2015; Balfron Social Club, 50percentbalfron.tumblr.com; Tower Hamlets Renters, towerhamletsrenters.wordpress.com (accessed 17 Jan. 2016). 69. Vanessa Crawford, ‘Balfron residents: “Privatising the tower will segregate the community”’, The Architects’ Journal, 3 Nov. 2015. 70. Laura Mark, ‘C20 Society: ‘Loss of Goldfinger features at Balfron not justified’, The Architects’ Journal, 14 Oct. 2015. 71. Baron Cashman, ‘Olympics 2012: Regeneration Legacy’, Lords Hansard, 5 Nov. 2015. 215

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES 72. Historic England, ‘Balfron Tower: List Entry Summary’, 2015: historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1334931 (accessed 17 Jan. 2016). 73. Ibid. 74. This was aided by the fact that Historic England had issued a further statement endorsing the refurbishment plans. For a robust and critical stance see, James Dunnett, ‘Historic England is failing in its mission’, The Architects’ Journal, 6 Jan. 2015. 75. ‘Balfron Tower, Poplar: ‘“they all said the flats were lovely”’, Municipal Dreams, 2014: municipaldreams.wordpress. com/2014/10/21/balfron-tower-poplar-2/ (accessed 17 Jan. 2016). 76. Studio Egret West 2015, p.18.

CHAPTER NINE 1. David Cameron, ‘I’ve put the bulldozing of sink estates at the heart of turnaround Britain’, Sunday Times, 10 Jan. 2016: www. thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/comment/columns/article1654318. ece (accessed 12 Aug. 2016). 2. Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), ‘Prime Minister pledges to transform sink estates’, Prime Minister’s Office, 10 Downing Street, 10 Jan. 2016: www.gov.uk/government/ news/prime-minister-pledges-to-transform-sink-estates (accessed 10 May 2016). 3. Jennifer Robinson, ‘The urban now: theorising cities beyond the new’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol.16, no.6, 2013, pp.659–77. 4. Ibid., p.663. 5. Ibid., p.664; Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Harvard University Press, London and Cambridge, MA 1999. 6. Cameron 2016; DCLG 2016. 7. On ‘failure’ in relation to social-housing discourse in London see David Roberts, ‘Make Public: Performing Public Housing in Regenerating East London’, unpublished PhD thesis (University College London), 2016. 8. Geoffrey Crossick, ‘From gentleman to residuum: languages of social description in Victorian Britain’ in Penelope Corfield (ed.), Language, History and Class, Basil Blackwell, Oxford and Cambridge MA 1991, pp.150–78 (p.152). 9. Raymond Williams, Keywords, Croom Helm, London 1976. 10. Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A vocabulary of modern architecture, Thames and Hudson, London 2000. 11. Ben Campkin and Ger Duijzings, ‘Engaged urbanism: situated and experimental methodologies for fairer cities’ and Matthew Gandy, ‘Methods, metaphors and the interdisciplinary terrain of urban research’ in Ben Campkin and Ger Duijzings (eds), Engaged Urbanism: Cities and methodologies, IB Tauris, London 2016. 12. Campkin and Duijzings 2016, p.14; and Jennifer Robinson, ‘Cities Methodologies Matter: Comparative urbanism and global urban theory’, in Campkin and Duijzings (eds) 2016, pp.23–7.

216

13. A counterpart to the political discourse of sink is evident in the wider prevalence for ‘sink spectacle’ in British popular culture. For a discussion of sink spectacle looking across political, media and popular culture sources, see Ben Campkin, Remaking London: Decline and Regeneration in Urban Culture, IB Tauris, London 2013. On the cultural representation of British council estates see also Katie Beswick, ‘The council estate: representation, space and the potential for performance’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, vol.16, no.3, 2011, pp.421–35, and Roberts 2016. 14. Campkin 2013, p.97. 15. On New Labour’s lexicon see Loretta Lees, ‘The urban injustices of New Labour’s “New Urban Renewal”: the case of the Aylesbury Estate in London’, Antipode, vol.46, no.4, 1 Sept. 2014, pp.921–47. 16. Cameron 2016. 17. Mike Raco, State-Led Privatisation and the Demise of the Democratic State: Welfare Reform and Localism in an Era of Regulatory Capitalism, Ashgate, London and New York 2013. 18. Cameron 2016. On spatial cleansing see Michael Herzfeld, ‘Spatial cleansing: monumental vacuity and the idea of the West’, Journal of Material Culture, vol.11, nos.1–2, 2006, pp.127–49. 19. The act was passed by royal assent on 12 May 2016. 20. The article announces investment of – just – £140m in estate regeneration and a new estates regeneration strategy that ‘will sweep away the planning blockages’. Cameron 2016; DCLG 2016. Given the limited public funding made available, which is only in loan form, the model is that community partners will team up with developers. Responses included, for example, Philip Johnston, ‘The welfarist Left wants poor people to be trapped in sink estates forever’, The Telegraph, 11 Jan. 2016; ‘David Cameron’s “sink estate” plans are no more than a distraction’, Independent, 11 Jan. 2016: www.independent.co.uk/voices/david-camerons-sink-estateplans-are-no-more-than-a-distraction-a6806776.html (accessed 17 Aug. 2016); Keir Mudie, ‘David Cameron’s £140m sink estates fund exposed as documents reveal it has to be paid back’, Mirror, 28 Feb. 2016; Anne Power, ‘Council estates: why demolition is anything but the solution’, LSE Blogs, 2016: blogs.lse.ac.uk/ politicsandpolicy/sink-estates-demolition (accessed 18 August 2016). 21. Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson, The Social Logic of Space, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1984; Bill Hillier, Space is the Machine: A Configurational Theory of Architecture, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1996. For the Space Syntax research on the London Riots see ‘London, riots research’: www. spacesyntax.com/project/2011-london-riots (accessed 18 August 2016). 22. Cameron’s rhetorical response to the riots, characterised by critics such as sociologists Graham and Annette Scambler as ‘moral panic’, is one recurrent theme in the literature interpreting the riots. Graham Scambler and Annette Scambler, ‘Underlying the riots: the invisible politics of class’, Sociological Research Online, vol. 16, no.4: www.socresonline.org.uk/16/4/25.html (accessed 17 Aug. 2016). See also Daniel Briggs (ed.), The English Riots of 2011: A Summer of Discontent, Waterside Press, Hook 2012.

REFERENCES 23. See Jeremy Till, ‘The broken middle: the space of the London riots’, Cities, vol.34, Oct. 2013, pp.71–4; and Bill Hillier, ‘Credible mechanisms or spatial determinism’, Cities, vol.34, Oct. 2013, pp.75–7. 24. Till 2013, p.72. 25. Till 2013, p.74. 26. Hillier 2013, pp.75–7. 27. Prime Minister’s Office, ‘Estate regeneration: article by David Cameron’, 10 Jan. 2016: www.gov.uk/government/speeches/ estate-regeneration-article-by-david-cameron (accessed 10 Aug. 2016). 28. Savills, Completing London’s Streets: How the Regeneration and Intensification of Housing Estates Could Increase London’s Supply of Homes and Benefit Residents, Savills Research Report to the Cabinet Office, London, 2016. 29. For details of the company’s research activities see: Savills, ‘Residential research’: www.savills.co.uk/research/uk/residentialresearch.aspx (accessed 10 Aug. 2016). I am grateful to Yolande Barnes for discussing the company’s research profile with me. 30. Ibid. 31. Savills 2016. See also: Savills Plc for the Prince’s Foundation, Valuing Sustainable Urbanism: A Report Measuring and Valuing New Approaches to Residentially Led Mixed Use Growth, The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment, London 2007. 32. Savills 2016, p.16. 33. Ibid., p.17. 34. Ibid., p.30. 35. Ibid., p.41. 36. Ibid., p.12; Prime Minister’s Office 2016. 37. Savills 2016, p.6 f1, p.9. 38. Savills 2016, p.8. 39. The report states: ‘these sites have been disguised and anonymised because they are intended to be hypothetical, generic and representative and do not represent any current, existing or proposed scheme currently pertaining to those sites and should not be construed as such’. Savills 2016, p.16. 40. 35 Percent Campaign, Completing London’s Clearances, 2016: www.35percent.org/2016-01-31-completing-londons-clearances (accessed 7 May 2016). The estates identified are Nelson/Portland estate on East Street in Walworth (Site C); the Glyndon estate in Woolwich (Site B); and the Ampthill Square estate in Camden (Site A). 41. See, for example, the controversy over the UK government’s ultimately unsuccessful proposal to introduce an ‘anti-lobbying’ clause to all government research grants. Robin McKie, ‘Britain’s scientists must not be gagged’, The Guardian, 17 April 2016: www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/17/britainsscientists-must-not-be-gagged (accessed 17 Aug. 2016). 42. Savills 2016, p.6 f.1. 43. For more detailed discussion of Newman’s methods see Campkin 2013, p.92.

44. Savills 2016, p.20. 45. For a recent review of the evidence on refurbishment or demolition options see UCL Urban Laboratory and Engineering Exchange for Just Space and the London Tenants Federation, Demolition or refurbishment of social housing? A review of the evidence, UCL Urban Laboratory and Engineering Exchange, London, 27 Oct. 2014. 46. Savills 2016, p.29. 47. Ibid., p.56. 48. For the panel’s stated objectives and a full list of members, see: DCLG and Brandon Lewis MP, ‘Heseltine launches panel of experts to kick-start estates regeneration’, 9 Feb. 2016: www.gov.uk/ government/news/heseltine-launches-panel-of-experts-to-kickstart-estates-regeneration (accessed 7 May 2016). For its call for communities to come forward with projects see: DCLG, Estate Regeneration Statement, 23 Feb. 2016: www.gov.uk/government/ publications/estates-regeneration-statement (accessed 12 Aug. 2016). The deadline for submissions was 10 June 2016. At the time of writing, it is not clear how the panel are responding to submissions made in response to this call, or how it is functioning under the newly appointed Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Sajid Javid MP) and new Minister of State for Housing and Planning (Gavin Barwell MP) appointed under Prime Minister Teresa May’s administration. 49. Nadir Lahiji and Daniel S Friedman, ‘At the sink: architecture in abjection’, in Nadir Lahiji and Daniel S Friedman (eds), Plumbing: Sounding modern architecture, Princeton Architectural Press, New York 1997, p.39. 50. In noun form it was applied to schools before estates, and in 1972, both the Daily Mail and the Guardian newspapers referred to ‘sink’ schools. See Campkin 2013, p.99; Daily Mail, 4 Oct. 1972; The Guardian, 17 Oct. 1972. 51. Jane Morton, ‘Tough Estates’, New Society, 18 Nov. 1976, p.365. 52. Gavin Weightman, ‘The making of modern slum estates’, New Society, 29 June 1978, pp.706–8 (p.707). 53. Ibid., p.706. 54. Ibid., pp.707–8. 55. Ibid., p.708. 56. Ibid., p.708. 57. UCL Urban Laboratory and Engineering Exchange 2014. 58. Gavin Weightman, ‘Moss Side story’, New Society, Vol. 45, 13 July 1978, p.61. New Society also concerned itself with negative estate reputation and stigmatisation in reference to racial stereotyping as Weightman, in a second article referring to sink estates, reported on Moss Side’s ‘respectable working class’ reputation up until the end of the Second World War having subsequently been replaced by an image of being ‘bad and black’. 59. Ibid., p.62. 60. Paul Barker (ed.), One for Sorrow, Two for Joy: Ten Years of New Society, Allen & Unwin, London 1972. In this anthology Barker outlines the magazine’s emphasis on good quality journalism combined with social scientific analyses, including its own surveys, to capture complexity. 217

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES 61. Weightman 1978b, p.62. 62. Barker 1972, p.13. 63. Interestingly, given Lord Heseltine’s current role as chair of the Estate Regeneration Panel, Young is critical of Heseltine, then in his role as Environment Secretary (1979 to 1983), and a key figure in the implementation of the Thatcher government’s Right to Buy policy – in particular, for his local-authority spending cuts. 64. ‘A Guide to the Housing Finance Act’, New Society, 28 Dec. 1972. 65. Anon., ‘Two new departures in the analysis of youth violence’, British Journal of Criminology, vol.19, no.3, 1979, pp.270–8. 66. Till 2013, p.72. See also: Dominic Severs, ‘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, 2010, pp.449–97. 67. Alex Potts, ‘The New Right and architectural aesthetics’, History Workshop Journal, No. 12, Autumn 1981, pp.159–62. 68. Ibid., p.162. 69. Ibid., p.159. 70. Ibid., p.160. 71. For a discussion of the use of environmental determinist arguments in relation to London’s Aylesbury Estate, see Campkin 2013, pp.77–104. 72. Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: a study in the relationship between classes in Victorian society, Verso, London, 1971, p.11. 73. Ibid., p.14. 74. Ibid., p.127. 75. Crossick 1991, pp.154–5. 76. Ibid., p.163. 77. Forty 2000, p.101. For a parallel discussion of regeneration as a metaphor for urban change see Ben Campkin, ‘On regeneration’ in Iain Borden, Murray Fraser and Barbara Penner (eds), Forty Ways to Think About Architecture, Wiley, Chichester 2014, pp.54–9. 78. Cameron 2016. 79. Jennifer Gabrys, ‘Sink: the dirt of systems’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol.27, 2009, pp.666–81 (p.666). 80. Ibid., p.667. 81. Such a move might resonate with the work of feminist architectural theorist Jane Rendell who uses ‘site writing’ to negotiate the history and mourning of London’s post-war housing stock (see Jane Rendell, ‘May Mo(u)rn’, in Sophie Warren and Jonathan Mosley (eds), Beyond Utopia, Errant Bodies, Los Angeles 2012) as well as with the critical methodology of hope and potentiality that performance- and queer-theorist José Muñoz sets out in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, New York University Press, New York and London 2009.

CHAPTER TEN 1. Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC), The Energy Efficiency Strategy: The Energy-Efficiency Opportunity in the UK, DECC, London 2012. 218

2. Houses built up to 1914 are included in this study as part of the ‘long’ Victorian period because they share many of the same characteristics in terms of construction and materials. 3. DECC, DUKES – Domestic Energy Consumption in the UK 2011, Publication URN 11D/808, DECC, London 2011. 4. Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), English housing survey headline report 2013 to 2014: section 2 housing stock tables, DCLG, London, 2015. 5. European Community (EC), A Roadmap for moving to a competitive low carbon economy in 2050, EC, Brussels, 2011. 6. A deep retrofit is a high standard of whole building upgrade beyond current Building Regulations to meet climate-change mitigation efforts and provide occupants thermal comfort long into the future with low energy bills. Typically a deep retrofit leads to seventy-five per cent or more energy consumption reduction. This includes fabric energy efficiency measures and increased efficiency from services but excludes renewable energy provision. 7. DECC, The Energy Efficiency Strategy: The Energy-Efficiency Opportunity in the UK, DECC, London, 2012; DECC, Low Carbon Transition Plan, DECC, London, 2009; DECC, The Carbon Plan: Delivering our low carbon future, DECC, London, 2011. 8. Sustainable Development Commission (SDC), Stock Take: Delivering Improvements in Existing Housing, Sustainable Development Commission, London, 2006; Anne Power, ‘Does demolition or refurbishment of old and inefficient homes help to increase our environmental, social and economic viability?’ Energy Policy, vol.36, no.12, 2008, pp.4487–4501; Gavin Killip, Building A Greener Britain – Transforming the UK’s Existing Housing Stock, Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford 2008. 9. DCLG, English Housing Survey Households 2010–11, National Statistics/DCLG, London, 2012. 10. On a square-metre comparison basis. Ibid.; English House Condition Survey 2007 – Annual Report, DCLG, London 2009. 11. ‘Sustainable Suburbia’, MacCormac Jamieson Prichard Architects, London, 2007. 12. Stefan Muthesius, The English Terraced House, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 1982, p.60. 13. About 65% of such windows have been replaced. Michael Gentry, English Heritage Scoping Study Final Report v.1, English Heritage, 14 March 2010. 14. Ibid. 15. National Energy Foundation (NEF), Save money by adding insulation to your home, National Energy Foundation, Milton Keynes 2011. 16. Paul Baker, Technical Paper 10: U-values and traditional buildings. In situ measurements and their comparisons to calculated values, Glasgow Caledonian University, Glasgow 2011; F. G. N. Li et al., ‘Solid-wall U-values: heat flux measurements compared with standard assumptions’, Building Research & Information, 2014, pp.1–15; Soki Rhee-Duverne and Paul Baker, Research into the thermal performance of traditional brick walls, English Heritage, 14 March 2013. 17. Here the definition of ‘heritage’ includes aesthetic, historic, social

REFERENCES and cultural values – after Kalliopi Fouseki and May Cassar, ‘Energy Efficiency in Heritage Buildings – Future Challenges and Research Needs’, The Historic Environment: Policy & Practice, vol.5, no.2, 2014, pp.95–100; English Heritage (EH), Improving Historic Soho’s Environmental Performance – Practical Retrofitting Guidance, EH, London 2013; EH, Energy Efficiency and Historic Buildings Application of Part L of the Building Regulations to historic and traditionally constructed buildings, NBS, London 2011. 18. Marion Baeli, Residential Retrofit: 20 case studies, RIBA Publishing, London 2013. 19. Fouseki and Cassar 2014; EH 2011; EH 2013. 20. Petra Eriksson et al., ‘EFFESUS Methodology for Assessing the Impacts of Energy-Related Retrofit Measures on Heritage Significance’, The Historic Environment: Policy & Practice, vol.5, no.2, 2014, pp.132–49. 21. See for example Anne Power, ‘Housing and sustainability: demolition or refurbishment?’, Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers – Urban Design and Planning, vol.163, no.4, 2010, pp.205–16. 22. Baeli 2013, pp.64–7. 23. Ibid., p.64. 24. Fouseki and Cassar 2014, pp.95–100. 25. DCLG, Permitted development for householders: Technical Guidance, April 2014. 26. ‘Don’t Move, Improve! 2016: Shortlist Announced’: newlondonarchitecture.org/programme/awards/dont-moveimprove/dmi-2016-shortlist-announced (accessed 28 April 2016). 27. Michael Petzet, ‘Principles of preservation: an introduction to the international charters for conservation and restoration 40 years after the Venice Charter’, ICOMOS, Munich 2004, p.28. 28. ‘International charter for the conservation and restoration of monuments and sites (Venice Charter)’, Second international congress of architects and technicians of historic monuments, ICOMOS, Venice, 1964. 29. John Ruskin, ‘The Lamp of Memory’, in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 2nd edn, Kent 1880, pp.194–8. 30. Petzet 2004. 31. Susan Venner, ‘London, Balham, Cornford Grove’, SuperHome Database: www.superhomes.org.uk/superhomes/london-balhamcornford-grove (accessed 28 April 2016); Venner Lucas Architects, ‘80% House’: www.vennerlucas.co.uk/house.html (accessed 28 April 2016). 32. This is based on a subjective impression, but one that is reflected in the kind of projects that win awards in the architectural profession: none of the projects on the New London Architecture ‘Don’t Move, Improve!’ shortlist, for example, faithfully matches the existing building. 33. Robert Adam, ‘Does the heritage dogma destroy living history?’ Context, May 2003: ihbc.org.uk/context_archive/79/dogma/ adam.html (acessed 21 Aug. 2016). 34. Prince Charles, ‘Foreword’, in Matthew Hardy (ed.), The Venice Charter Revisited: Modernism, Conservation and Tradition in the 21st

Century, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Cambridge 2008, p.xiii. 35. Chartered Institute of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE), ‘CIBSE Case Study: Clapham Retrofit, London – Arboreal Architecture’, 2016: www.cibse.org/knowledge/knowledge-items/ detail?id=a0q20000008JgY8 (accessed 28 April 2016). 36. Risks can also be managed by reducing the internal wall insulation depth; the Sustainable Traditional Building Alliance (STBA) recommends about 60mm or a U-value of ≤ 0.6 W/m2K for Bristol City Council. This shallow insulation approach could be offset by increased insulation elsewhere. 37. CIBSE 2016. 38. Email from Harry Patticas to Sofie Pelsmakers, 2 May 2016. 39. Bere Architects, ‘65 Exmouth Market – Low Energy + Passivhaus techniques’: www.bere.co.uk/projects/65-exmouth-market-lowenergy-passivhaus-techniques (accessed 7 April 2016). 40. bere:architects, ‘Masonry permeability, moisture and internal insulation’, www.bere.co.uk/blog/masonry-permeability-moistureand-internal-insulation (accessed 7 April 2016). 41. Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What happens after they’re built, Penguin, London 1995. 42. Ibid., p.13. 43. Jukka Jokilehto, ‘International Trends in Historic Preservation: From Ancient Monuments to Living Cultures’, APT Bulletin, vol.29, nos.3–4, 1998, p.18. 44. Pamela Jerome, ‘An Introduction to Authenticity in Preservation’, APT Bulletin, vol.39, nos.2–3, 2008, pp.3–7. 45. Tsuruta Architects, ‘House of Trace’: www.tsurutaarchitects.com/#/ houseoftrace (accessed 7 April 2016). 46. Australia ICOMOS, The Burra Charter: The Australia ICOMOS charter for places of cultural significance 1999, with associated guidelines and code on the ethics of co-existence, Victoria, Australia 2000. 47. Jokilehto 1998, pp.17–19. 48. Ibid. 49. The information about the Granby project in the following paragraph is based on: Assemble and Niamh Riordan (eds), Granby Workshop Catalogue, Granby Workshop, Liverpool Sept. 2015. 50. See for example: ‘Het Broekmanhuis’: www.amsterdam.nl/ wonen-leefomgeving/bouwen-verbouwen/zelfbouw/waarbouwen/zelfbouw-nieuw-west/nieuwsartikelen/broekmanhuis/ (accessed 28 April 2016). 51. Power, 2008; Anne Power 2010. 52. ‘Giroscope: Turning empty houses into homes’: www.giroscope. org.uk/index.php/properties (accessed 28 April 2016). 53. Ellis Woodman, ‘Carbuncle Cup winner 2013: A triumph for the dark side’, Building Design, 29 Aug. 2013: www.bdonline.co.uk/ carbuncle-cup-winner-2013-a-triumph-for-the-darkside/5059745.article (accessed 21 Aug. 2016). 54. ShedKM, ‘Chimney Pot Park’: www.shedkm.co.uk/project/37/ chimney-pot-park (accessed 28 April 2016); ShedKM, Homework, www.shedkm.co.uk/pdf/homework_presentation.pdf (accessed 28 April 2016). 219

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES 55. ShedKM, Homework, www.shedkm.co.uk/pdf/homework_ presentation.pdf (accessed 28 April 2016). 56. Phil Griffin, ‘On the terraces’, Building Design, June 2007: www. bdonline.co.uk/on-the-terraces/3088993.article (accessed 21 Aug. 2016). 57. ‘Urban splash finally booted out of Salford Chimney Pot Park’, Salford Star, 3 Sept. 2014. 58. ‘Roundtable: Remodeling and refurbishment’, Place North West, 3 June 2011. 59. ‘About’, Zero Carbon House: zerocarbonhousebirmingham.org.uk (accessed 28 April 2016). 60. ‘Insulation and airtightness (technical)’, Zero Carbon House: zerocarbonhousebirmingham.org.uk/technical/insulation-andairtightness-technical (accessed 28 April 2016). 61. ‘What is a zero carbon house?, Zero Carbon House: zerocarbonhousebirmingham.org.uk/about/what-is-a-zerocarbon-house (accessed 28 April 2016). 62. ‘Insulation and airtightness (technical)’: Zero Carbon House, op.cit. 63. See comment in the ‘New Matches Old’ section describing interstitial condensation risks when applying internal wall insulation and how these risks might be managed. 64. ‘Architectural design’, Zero Carbon House: zerocarbonhousebirmingham.org.uk/design/architectural-design (accessed 28 April 2016). 65. Ibid. 66. ‘Aims of zero carbon house’, Zero Carbon House: zerocarbonhousebirmingham.org.uk/about/aims (accessed 28 April 2016).

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INDEX 80% House, Balham 183, 184, 184 Abbey Orchard Street Estate, Westminster 66, 68, 68, 71 Abercrombie, Sir Patrick 13, 96 Academy, Royal 145 Ackroyden 127 Acton Borough Council 93, 96–7, 98, 99 Acton Gazette 100–1 Acton Green 94 Adam, Robert 183 Addison Act (1919) 12, 95 AECB Silver standard 184 affordability crisis 1, 2–4, 34, 188 ‘AJ Retrofit Awards’ 181 Albert and Victoria Cottages, Spitalfields 41 Albert Court, Kensington 86–7 Albert Hall Mansions Company 84 Albert Hall Mansions, Kensington 87 Aldous, Tony 119 Allan, Robert 132 Allen, Matthew 11, 83, 83 Alton Street, Lansbury, Poplar 131, 135 Alwyne Villas, Canonbury 118–19, 118 Amalgamated Investment and Property 116 Anderson, Paul 143 Andrew McDowall & Son 30 Anstey, Bryan 133 Arboreal Architecture 183–4, 185 Architect and Building News 132, 132 architect–builder collaborations 71–2 Architects’ Journal 133, 144, 149, 160 Architectural Review 146 Architype 15 Artisans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Improvement Act (1875) 67 Artizans’, Labourers’ and General Dwellings Company 10, 47–8, 85 Arts and Crafts 45, 95, 182, 190 Arundell, Peter 30 Ashley Gardens Properties Ltd 85

Ashley Gardens, Westminster 78 Ashpitel, Arthur 77 Assemble 187, 187 Associated Architects 190, 190 At Home in Britain exhibition 90 Austin, Robert 48 Australia 186 Avanti Architects 158 Aylesbury Estate 194 Baeli, Marion 180–1 Bailey, Keith 42 Baines, Frank 12 Baker, Paul 179 Balfour, Graham 49–51 Balfron Tower 137, 141–61, 142, 146 academic opinion 141–7, 150 activism against regeneration 151, 157–60 archive material 147–50, 148, 149 design 153–5, 154, 156 listing 146–7, 151, 159, 160 in popular culture 143, 144 residents opinions 151–7 Balsall Heath, Birmingham 190, 190 Bamford, Samuel 21 Banham, Reyner 144 Barkston Gardens, Earl’s Court 87 Barnsbury 113, 119 Barnsbury Society 117 Barrie House, South Acton 93, 103 Barry, Sir Gerald 133 Barthes, Roland 165 Bartlett School of Architecture 166, 173–4 Basil Scruby and Co. 12 Battersea Council 42, 52 Battersea, Victorian 10, 37–56, 38 Bennerley Road 49 builders 42–3, 55–6 gentrification 52–3, 54–5 221

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES housing conditions 49–52, 51 housing typologies 39–42, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 44 leasehold system 43 lessons from 53–6 Oberstein Road 48–9, 48 population growth and expansion 38–9 post-war redevelopment 50, 52 Poyntz Road Triangle 44–5, 44 Shaftesbury Park 47–8, 47 Three Sisters area 45–6, 46 Bear Lane, Southwark 196–7, 197 Beard, Stanley 96 Becontree, Dagenham 12 Bedford Park 31 Bell, Charlotte 144 Bellamy, Alex 133 Beningfield, T.J. 135 Benjamin, Walter 164 Bennerley Road, Battersea 49 Bennett, Arnold 81 Bennie, Claire 71 Bentley, Daniel 4 bere:architects 184–5, 185 Berkeley Homes 15 Beswick, Katie 144 Bethune Road, Stoke Newington 83, 83 Bevan, Nye 97–8 Birmingham 190, 190 Blackfriars Peabody Estate 66, 67, 71 Blair, Tony 165 Blee, Anthony 118 Blenkin, J. 26, 28 Blyth, James 83 Bollo Bridge Road, South Acton 96, 103 Bolton, William 109 Booth, Charles 40–1, 43, 49, 51, 60, 82, 84, 110 Boundary Street Estate 11 Boyce, Thomas 85 Boyle, Danny 143 BP Pensions 116 Bragg, Henry 49 Brailsford Road, Tulse Hill 195 Brent 138, 180, 181, 184–5, 185 Brentham Garden Estate, Ealing 95 222

Brief Street, Minet Estate, Lambeth 31, 32 Brinson, W.I. 136 British Land Company 94 Broadwater Farm Estate, Tottenham 173 Brooks, William 43 Broome, Jon 15 brownfield development 17, 168 Brownfield Estate, Poplar see Balfron Tower Brutalism 144 Build to Rent 89–90 Builder, The 77, 78, 82, 83 building applications, Victorian period 23, 26 Building Regulations 179, 182, 186 Building Research Station 172 Burdett-Coutts, Angela 60, 62 Burra Charter (1981) 186 buy-to-let 2, 76, 89 by-law housing 31 Byrne, Paul 113–14 Calais Gate, Minet Estate, Lambeth 32, 33 Calais Street, Minet Estate, Lambeth 29, 29, 30, 31 Caledonian Road, Islington 188, 189 Camberwell Grove Conservation Area 196 Cameron, David 54, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 169, 170, 175 Canary Wharf 138 Cannadine, David 51 Canonbury, Islington 107–12, 108, 109 construction 109–10, 110 gentrification 113–20, 115, 116, 117, 118 inter-war period 111–12 Canonbury Park North and South, Islington 108, 109, 110, 110, 112, 114, 115, 116 Canonbury Tower, Islington 109, 109, 112, 117 carbon emissions 177, 178, 183 Carbuncle Cup 188, 189 Cardiff 114 Carlisle Place, Westminster 77, 78 Carlton Avenue, Dulwich Village 195 Carlyle Mansions, Chelsea 78, 79 Carton, Ronald 112 Cashman, Baron 160 Cavendish Buildings, Clerkenwell 84 Chadwick, Edwin 59

INDEX Chambers, F. 77 Charing Cross Road 84 Charles Hocking House, South Acton 99, 103 Charles, Prince of Wales 75, 183 Cheap Trains Act (1883) 11 Chelsea 75–6, 78, 79, 83, 107, 115 Chelsea Court, Chelsea 78 Chelsea Gardens, Chelsea Bridge Road 84 Cherry, Bridget 145 Chiltern Court, Baker Street 81 Chimney Pot Park, Salford 188–9 Chitty, Anthony 126 Christophers, John 190, 190 Churchill Gardens, Pimlico 126, 127 City & West End Properties Ltd 85, 86, 89 Civic Amenities Act (1967) 118, 119 Clapham 37, 38, 183–4, 185 Clerical, Medical and General Assurance Society 114–15 Clerkenwell Peabody Estate 59, 71 Co-operative Housing in South- East London (CHISEL) 15 Coleman, Alice 15 coloured bricks 65, 66, 69, 70, 71 Columbia Square, Bethnal Green 60, 69 Community Land Trusts 187, 188 Complete Streets approach 167–71 Comprehensive Development Areas 13 compulsory purchase 10, 13, 67, 96, 113, 169 Connolly, P. 135 Conservation Areas Canonbury, Islington 118–19 sustainable retrofit in 183, 184–5, 184, 185 Three Sisters, Battersea 46 conservation movement 15 Conservative Land Society 49 Consolidated London Properties Ltd 85, 86, 89 construction costs 4, 34, 71–2 Cook, Sydney 138 Cooper, J.S. 41 Cooperative Builders 29, 29, 32, 32 Corbett, Archibald Cameron 10–11, 19–20 cork insulation 183, 184 Cormont Road, Minet Estate, Lambeth 30, 30, 31 Cornford Grove, Balham 183, 184, 184 Cornwall Mansions, Baker Street 82–3, 82

Corporation Buildings, Farringdon Road 9 Costain, Richard 12, 13 Costelloe, Christopher 18 cottage flats 9, 11, 12, 41–2, 41, 42, 95 council housing 3, 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 Battersea 42, 52 Canonbury, Islington 112, 116 Right to Buy 15, 48, 58, 121 South Acton 91, 93, 95, 96–103, 97, 98 see also Balfron Tower; high-rise housing County of London Plan (1943) 13, 124–5, 126 Courtauld Institute 141–2 Covent Garden Peabody Estate 71 Criffel Avenue, Streatham 196 Crossick, Geoffrey 164, 175 Crossman, Richard 139 Crouch, John 72 Cubitt, Thomas 42 Cubitt, William 57, 63, 71, 72 Currie House, Poplar 130, 134–5, 138 Curtis, Fred 28, 29, 30–1, 32 custom-build 3, 14, 18–19, 34–5 Cutler, Horace 147, 148 Daily Mail 143 Darbishire, Henry Astley 57, 60–1, 62, 66–7, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72 Darbishire Place, Whitechapel 72–3, 73 Darbourne, John 138 Davidge, William 126 Davies, Felicity 151 Davis, Abraham 11, 13, 83, 84 Davis, David Haldin 114 Dawes, John 109 Dawson, Thomas 125 De Beauvoir Trust 120 de Soissons, Louis 114, 115, 120 Debenham, Frank 85 defensible space theory 15, 101, 172 densities/densification 1, 7, 18, 54, 105, 168, 193–4 inter-war period 12 post-war period 13, 98, 99, 100, 101, 103, 125 Victorian period 9, 10, 17–18, 31, 32, 32, 66, 67–8, 68, 71, 96 see also high-rise housing; middle-class flats 223

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES Dent Coad, Emma 14, 159 Devon Mansions, Tooley Street 84 Dickens, Charles 7, 60 direct contracting of building 19, 20, 32 Docomomo 152, 160 Doddington Estate, Battersea 52 Dolphin Square, Pimlico 13 ‘Don’t Move, Improve!’ awards 181–3, 185–6 downward filtering 51 Doyle House, South Acton 99 Duckworth, George 82 Dudley Committee Report (1944) 13 Duffy, Frank 185 Dunleavy, Patrick 132 Dunnett, James 145–6, 150, 152, 159 Dyne Road, Brent 184–5, 185 Eales, Frederick 79–80, 85 Ealing Borough Council 91, 92, 93, 99, 100, 101, 103 Ealing Homes 103 East End Dwellings Company 10 ECD Architects 103 Edmonds, Richard 135 EFFESUS Methodology 180 Elledge, Jonn 2 Ellis, David 15 Eltham 12 Enclosure Act (1859) 94 energy efficiency see sustainable retrofit Enfield 138 Engels, Friedrich 9, 11, 60, 175 English Heritage 91, 92, 103, 146–7, 150, 180 Equity and Law Life Assurance Society 114–15 Erith, Raymond 116, 117 Esher, Lionel 139 Estate Regeneration Advisory Panel 170–1 Evans, Robin 60 Evelyn, John 8 Evening Standard 143, 144 external insulation 180, 181, 183, 184 façadism 188, 189 Family and Kinship (1957) 134 Farquharson and McMorran 134 224

Farrant, Sir Richard 85 Farrer, John 10–11 fiction, middle-class flats in 80–1 financing house-building 18–19, 34–5 see also mortgages Finsbury 126 Finsbury Borough Council 13 Finsbury Health Centre 159 Fiske, Bill 135, 136 flats Battersea 41–2, 41, 42 cottage flats 9, 11, 12, 41–2, 41, 42, 95 Minet Estate, Lambeth 32, 32, 33 see also high-rise housing; middle-class flats; Peabody Estates ‘Flats in Four Stories’ (1881) 80–1 Fleming, Ian 144 Fluid 92–3, 103 Fogelberg, Iris 101 Forshaw, John Henry 13, 125, 126, 132, 135 Forster, E.M. 81 Fortunegate Road, Brent 180, 181 Forty, Adrian 141–2, 164, 175 Fouseki, Kalliopi 180, 181 freehold development 19–20 French, Hilary 145 Friedman, Daniel 171 Fulham Road, Chelsea 83 Gabrys, Jennifer 175 garden-city movement 11–12, 48, 95 Gardiner, Stephen 119 gentrification 15, 107 Battersea 52–3, 54–5 Canonbury, Islington 113–20, 115, 116, 117, 118 Georgian period 8–9, 196 Gibberd, Frederick 126 Gidlow Mills, Wigan 69 Gill, Eric 37 Giroscope 188 Gissing, George 9, 81, 82, 84 Glass, Ruth 55, 107 GLC see Greater London Council (GLC) Goddard & Smith 87

INDEX Godwin, George 7, 9 Goldfinger, Ernõ 137, 141, 144–6, 147–50, 148, 151, 152, 156, 158–9 Goldfinger, Ursula 147, 152 Gordon Mansions, Bloomsbury 86 Graça, Duarte Carrilho da 157 Grade II* listing 159, 160 Grade II listing 59, 146–7, 151 Granby Four Streets, Liverpool 187, 187 Graven Hill, Bicester 34 Great Exhibition (1851) 60 Greater London Authority (GLA) 3 Greater London Council (GLC) 93, 119, 124, 136–7, 138, 149 Greater London Regional Planning Committee 12 Green Belt 3, 12, 17, 113, 169 Green, Benny 120 greenfield development 17 Groser, John 134 ground rents 18, 20, 25, 34 Guardian, The 117, 118, 144 Guy, W.T.G. 136 Gwynn, John 8–9 Gwynne, James EA 43 Gwynne Road, Battersea 43, 44 Hackney 75, 120, 126, 173, 181–3, 181 Hamnett, Chris 85, 88 Hamor Hill, Charles 109, 110, 120 Hampstead 107 Hampton and Sons 87 Hanbury Estate, South Acton 97–8, 97, 98, 100, 103, 104 Hanson, Julienne 166 Hardy Court, South Acton 99–100 Hare, Ewan 44 Hargrave Mansions, Holloway 87, 89 Harms, Alfred 98 Hartnoll, James 11, 83–4 Harwood, Elain 145 Hatherley, Owen 145, 147, 159 Hayes, Bob 15 Heaver, Alfred 41 Hellman, Louis 149 Hendy, Sir Philip 118 heritage significance assessments 180

Heseltine, Lord 170–1 Heygate Estate, Southwark 197 Higgott, Andrew 145 High Paddington 14, 131–2, 132 high-rise housing 14, 123–39 Ackroyden and Roehampton 127–9, 127 Battersea 50, 52, 54 High Paddington 14, 131–2, 132 modern private sector 138–9 opposition to 134–6 Pimlico 126–7, 127, 138 South Acton 96–103, 97, 98, 99, 102, 104 Stepney and Poplar 128–31, 128, 129, 130, 131, 134–7, 136, 137, 138 Vertical Living Debate 133–4 see also Balfron Tower Hill, Octavia 10, 41 Hillier, Bill 166–7, 173 Hillman, Judy 118 Historic England 91, 159, 160 historic environment characterisation 91–2 historical overview 7–16 History Workshop Journal 173 Hodge, Margaret 114 Holborn 126 Holford, Sir William 132 Holloway 86, 87, 89 Holly Lodge Estate, Highgate 13 homes ‘fit for heroes’ campaign 12 Horsbrugh, Patrick 132, 132, 133 ‘House of Trace’, Forest Hill 185–6, 186 house prices 2, 4, 54, 55, 107, 113 Housing Act (1956) 124 Housing Action Areas (HAA) 49 Housing Action Trusts 15 Housing and Planning Act (2016) 15, 166 housing associations 2–3, 15, 41, 188 housing benefit 2 housing crises/shortages 1, 2–4, 7–16, 113–14, 188, 193 Housing Finance Act (1972) 119 Housing London: a Mid-Rise Solution (2014) 75 Housing Subsidies Act (1967) 139 Howard, Ebenezer 11, 12 Howards End (1910) 81 225

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES Hughes, John 127 Hull 188 I’Anson, Thomas Norman 99 Ideal Home 120 Ideal London Home, The 87 Ijeh, Ike 144 Iles, William Henry 45–6 Improved Industrial Dwellings Company 9, 83, 84 industrial buildings, Victorian period 68–9, 70 industrial tenements 8 Ingram, Thomas 49 Ingrave Street, Battersea 39 Institute of Civil Engineers 132 Institute of Community Studies 173 Institute of Historical Research 1 insulation 54, 179, 184, 185 cork 183, 184 external 180, 181, 183, 184 inter-war period 12–13, 111–12 Islington 15, 75 façadism 188, 189 Peabody Estate 58, 62–4, 63, 64, 65, 66, 69, 70 see also Canonbury, Islington Islington Council 112, 114, 116, 118, 119, 120 Islington Gazette, The 111 Iverna Gardens, Kensington 87 James Bond 144 Jarrett, Cynthia 173 Jeger, Lena 134 Jenkins, Simon 119, 143 Jensen, Rolf 132–3 Jerome, Jerome K. 84 Jerome, Pamela 185 Jerome Tower, South Acton 99 John Thompson and Partners 103 Johnson-Marshall, Percy 130, 133, 136, 138 Jones, Edgar 70 Jones, W.H. 85 Jordaan 195–6 Joseph, Delissa 78 Kadleigh, Serge 132, 132, 133 226

Kambala Estate, Battersea 52 Kemp, Frederick Nesbitt 83 Kennet, Lord 114 Kensington 75–6, 84, 86–7, 107 Kensington Gore Mansions Ltd 84 Labour government 139 Labourer’s Friend Society 9 Lady Workers’ Homes Company 13 Lahiji, Nadir 171 land availability 3 land costs 18, 34 Lansbury, George 134 Lansbury, Poplar 128, 129, 130–1, 131, 135 Larsen-Neilsen system 137, 138 Latchmere Baths, Battersea 44 Latham, Charles 125 LCC see London County Council (LCC) Le Corbusier 87, 132, 169, 171, 182 leasehold development 3, 8, 10, 18, 19–20, 34–5 Battersea 43 Minet Estate, Lambeth 21–6, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27 Leasehold Reform Act (1967) 116 Lemere, Bedford 85 Lester, Elliott 143 Lewisham 14–15 Li, F.G.N. 179 Liberal Party 94 lifts 78, 80 Limehouse Cut 129, 138 Ling, Arthur 130 listed buildings Balfron Tower 146–7, 151, 159, 160 Peabody Estates 59 sustainable retrofit of 180, 183–4, 185 Lloyd George, David 12 local authority housing see council housing Local Plans 3 see also County of London Plan (1943) localism 3, 18 Localism Act (2011) 18 Logie, Gordon 135 London & Quadrant Housing Trust 103 London and Quadrant housing 180, 181

INDEX London: Aspects of Change (1964) 107 London Building Act (1774) 8, 25 London Building Acts 23 London County Council (LCC) 11, 13, 31, 52, 68, 84, 93, 95, 98 see also high-rise housing London County Freehold and Leasehold Property Company Ltd (LCF) 85–7, 88, 89 London Dover and Chatham Railway 21 London Garden Suburbs Ltd 13 London Housing Society 84 Londonewcastle 157 Louvaine Area Residents Association (LARA) 49 Lubetkin, Berthold 13, 14, 126, 159 Lyons Housing Review 3 McDonald, David 11 Mackley, Thomas 48 maisonettes cottage flats 9, 11, 12, 41–2, 41, 42, 95 high-rise 96, 125, 127, 128, 131, 132, 135–6, 136 low-rise 135 see also Balfron Tower mansion flats see middle-class flats Mantua Street, Battersea 40 Mapledene Road, Hackney 181–3, 181 Maps Descriptive of London Poverty 60, 110 Margery Street Estate, Finsbury 13 Marples, Ernest 132 Matthew, Robert 126, 127, 130 Maugham Court, South Acton 97 Mayhew, George 21, 25, 28, 30 Mearns, Andrew 51 mechanical ventilation with heat recovery (MVHR) 180 Messrs Driver 20, 21, 23, 28, 29, 30 Metropolitan Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrious Classes (MAIDIC) 9, 41, 77 Metropolitan Board of Works 67, 84 Metropolitan Building Act (1844) 9, 25 Metropolitan Local Management Act (1862) 23 Metropolitan Railway Company 12, 81 Middle Class Dwellings Company (MCDC) 85 middle-class flats 10, 75–90, 78, 79, 82, 83, 89 corporate ownership 84–7, 86, 88 design 77, 78, 79–80, 81, 83

in fiction 80–1 model dwelling proposals 77–8, 78 rents 77, 78, 80, 84, 86–7, 89 middle-class housing Canonbury, Islington 109–10, 110, 111–12 change to working-class 51, 110–11 see also gentrification Mill Hill Park Estate 91, 95, 99 Milner Holland Commission 116, 119 Minet Estate, Lambeth 10, 17–35, 20 blocks of flats 32, 32, 33 first phase 21–6, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28 housing types 23–5, 24, 25 interior customisation 26, 32, 34 lessons from 33–5 second phase 26–32, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33 Minet, James Lewis 21, 26–9, 28, 33 Minet, William 19, 21, 28, 29, 30–2, 33, 34 Mirror, The 143, 144 MJP Architects 18 model dwellings 9–10, 59–60, 64, 69, 77–8, 78 ‘Model Houses for Families’, Bloomsbury 9, 69, 77 Modernism 13, 70, 97, 126, 144, 163, 165, 169–70, 171, 173–4, 182–3, 193 modular system, Peabody Estates 62–8, 63, 67, 71 Morley, Henry 77 Morris, Simon 101 Morris, Sir Parker 124 Morris Walk Estate, Woolwich 14, 138 Morris, William 15 mortgages 2, 15, 31, 43, 110, 114, 115, 117, 121 Mountjoy Estate, Cardiff 114 multiple occupation 8, 40–1, 41, 46, 49, 77 Mumford, Lewis 127 Munby, Denys 134 Myatt’s Fields Park 19, 31, 32 Nairn, Ian 119 Nara Charter (1994) 186 National Association for the Care and Rehabilitation of Offenders 101 National Association for the Promotion of Social Science 31 National Freehold Land Society 94 neoliberal ideology 166 227

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES Netherlands 34, 188 ‘Never go out after dark’ (1981) 172–3 New Barbican Committee 133 New London Architecture (NLA) 181 ‘The New Right and Architectural Aesthetics’ 173 New Society 171–3, 174 Newham 124 Newman, Oscar 15, 101, 169, 172 Niall McLaughlin Architects (NMA) 72–3, 73 Nicholson, Harry 97 Nine Elms, Battersea 55 Northampton Estate 111, 112, 114 Northampton, Marquess of 111, 114, 117, 118, 120 Oberstein Road, Battersea 48–9, 48 Observer, The 115, 116 Ocean Estate, Stepney 128, 129–30, 129, 138 Old Oak Estate, East Acton 95 Oldham, Ruth 147 Oriel Property Trust 114, 115, 116, 119, 120–1 ornament 60 Peabody Estates 65, 66, 69–70, 71 Victorian Battersea 45 O’Rourke, Martin 147 Orwell, George 117–18 Osborne Road, South Acton 94, 95 Overstrand Mansions, Battersea 81 Oxford & Cambridge Mansions, Marylebone 79–80, 85 Paddington 107, 126 see also High Paddington Pain, Arthur 45 Pain, Edward 45 Paris 75, 77, 79 Park Town Estate, Battersea 41, 41, 43 Parker, Barry 12, 95 Parker Morris Committee 13 Parratt, William 48 Parsons & Bamford 21, 23, 25, 25, 26, 28 Parsons, James Henry 21 part-buy/part-rent schemes 55 Passivhaus standard 184–5, 185, 190 Paticas, Harry 184 Paulet Road, Minet Estate, Lambeth 23, 25, 25, 29 228

Peabody Estates 57–73, 58, 59 appearance 65, 66, 68–70, 69 communal facilities 62, 63, 64–5 design 62–8, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68 lessons from 70–2 modern commissions 72–3, 73 Peabody, George 61 Peabody Square Islington 69, 70 Peabody Square, Islington 58, 62–4, 63, 64, 65, 66 Peabody Trust 9, 15, 57, 59, 61, 67, 71, 72 penthouses 78 Perks, Sydney 80, 82 Peter Arundell & Sons 30 Pevsner, Nikolaus 57–8, 128, 132 philanthropy 3, 9, 76 Minet Estate, Lambeth 19, 31 see also Peabody Estates Phillimore Court, Kensington 87 PHPP software 184 Pimlico 13, 115 high-rise housing 126–7, 127, 138 Peabody Estate 65, 66, 66, 67 Pinto, David 116, 119 Platform5 Architects 182 Plummer, Desmond 148 political rhetoric on housing 163–76 Complete Streets approach 167–71 evidence 166–9 as intervention 164–6 ‘sink estate’ metaphor 15, 54, 123, 163, 164, 171–4, 175 polychromy 65, 66, 69, 70, 71 Poplar 128–31, 128, 131, 134–7, 136, 138 see also Balfron Tower Poplar Borough Council 129, 131, 134–6, 136 Poplar Housing and Regeneration Community Association (HARCA) 151, 157–60 popular culture Balfron Tower in 143, 144 middle-class flats in 80–1 population growth 1, 2, 7 Victorian Battersea 38–9 post-war redevelopment 13–14, 193 Battersea 50, 52 South Acton 91, 93, 96–103, 97, 98, 99

INDEX Potts, Alex 173–4 poverty line 40 Powell & Moya 126, 127 Powell, Kenneth 145 Powell, Philip 127 Powers, Alan 145 Poyntz Road Triangle, Battersea 44–5, 44 Preserving Post-War Heritage (2001) 147 Prince of Wales Drive, Battersea 194 Prince’s Foundation for Building Community 75, 90 Proctor and Matthews 103 Proctor, Sir Dennis 118 public health 59 public housing see council housing Public Utility Housing Society 84 Queen Anne’s Mansions, Westminster 78 railways 38, 39 rainwater harvesting 54 Ramsey, Stanley 126 Randolph, Bill 85, 88 Rasmussen, Steen Eiler 109 rates 8 Regent’s Canal 129, 138 Rent Act (1957) 113 Rent Restriction Act (1915) 111 rents current day 2–3 ground rents 18, 20, 25, 34 middle-class flats 77, 78, 80, 84, 86–7, 89 present-day distortion 89 restriction legislation 111 Victorian Battersea 40, 46 retrofit see sustainable retrofit Retrofit for the Future project 180 Rhee-Duverne, Soki 179 RIBA 79, 90, 135 Ridgmount Gardens, Bloomsbury 85, 86 Right to Buy 15, 48, 58, 121 riots 166–7, 173 Roberts, Henry 60, 64, 69 Robin Hood Gardens, Polar 131, 150 Robinson, Jennifer 163, 165

Rodgers, Polly 151–2 Roehampton 127–9, 127 Rogers, Ab 157 Rolfe, William 85 Ronan Point 124, 137, 138, 139 roof gardens 80 Rowell, Andrew 114, 115 Rowton Houses Limited 85 Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes (1884–5) 7, 11 Royal Road, Southwark 197–9, 198 Rushclose Developments 116, 119, 121 Ruskin, John 91 Rylands & Sons 69 Saint, Andrew 145 St. Anne’s, Stepney 128, 130, 130, 131, 138 St. Pancras Borough Council 84 Salford 139, 188–9 Samuel, Raphael 93 Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1843) 59 sash windows 179, 180, 183 Saturday Review, The 78 Saunders, G.L. 31 ‘Save the Alwynes’ campaign 118–19 Savills Plc 167–70 Schinkel, Friedrich 70 Scruton, Roger 173 Section 106 Agreements 15 Sedgewick Mill, Ancoats 70 Segal, Walter 14–15 Self-build and Custom House-building Act (2015) 18 self-build housing 3, 14–15, 19, 34–5 self-build retrofits 188 servants, middle-class flats 76, 77, 79, 80 Shadwell Peabody Estate 58 Shaftesbury Avenue 84 Shaftesbury, Lord 61 Shaftesbury Park, Battersea 47–8, 47 shared facilities see communal facilities shared-ownership schemes 55 Shearsmith Tower, Stepney 137, 137 ShedKM 188 229

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES Shelter Housing Aid Centre 113–14 Shop Investments 114, 115, 116 Silkin, Lewis 125 Sims, George 51 Sims, George R 80–1 ‘sink estate’ metaphor 15, 54, 123, 163, 164, 171–4, 175 Skempton, A.W. 132 Slight, Stanley 97 slum clearance 10, 13, 63, 67, 112, 124, 131, 133, 139 Smith, T. Roger 77 Smithson, Alison 131, 144, 150 Smithson, Peter 131, 144, 150 social rented housing 2–3 see also council housing Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes (SICLC) 9, 60, 77 Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce 77 solar energy gains 178–9 solar power 54 Soley, Clive 102 solid wall construction 178, 179 South Acton 10, 91–105, 92, 93 early twentieth century 95–6 modern regeneration 91, 93, 103, 104, 105 post-war redevelopment 91, 93, 96–103, 97, 98, 99 tower blocks 99–101, 99, 102 Victorian period 94–5, 94, 95 South Acton Community Builders Co-operative Ltd 105 South Acton: Housing Histories 92, 103 South Acton Residents Action Group (SARAG) 91, 103, 105 South Acton Stories: Sharing Histories, Revealing Identity 92–3, 103 Southwark Council 197 Space Syntax Limited 166–7, 168 speculative development 8, 9, 10, 11, 12–13, 19–20 Battersea 39–40, 41, 42–3 see also Minet Estate, Lambeth Spence, Sir Basil 118–19 Spitalfields 8, 41 Peabody Estate 62 Sporle, Sidney 52 Stamford Hill 86 standardisation, Peabody Estates 62–8, 63, 67, 71 state-led gentrification 55 230

Stedman Jones, Gareth 174–5 Stepney 128–31, 128, 129, 130, 131, 134, 137, 137, 138 Stepney Borough Council’ 130 Stepney Reconstruction Group 134 Stifford Estate, Stepney 128, 131, 135–6, 138 Stik 103 Stow, John 8 Streatham Street, Bloomsbury 60 Studio Egret West 157 successive migration 51 Summerson, John 127 Sunday Times 143 ‘super-gentrification’ 55 ‘superdensity’ 76, 90 Surrey Lane Estate, Battersea 45–6, 46 surveyors, Victorian period 21–3 sustainable retrofit 54, 177–91 heritage implications 180–1, 181, 183–4, 185 layers of change 185–6, 186 matching existing building 183–5, 185 modernisations and extensions 181–3, 181, 184 radical transformations 188–91, 189, 190 soft aspects 186–7, 187 Swedenborg Gardens, Stepney 137, 137 Swenarton, Mark 12, 14 Swinfield, Doris 99 system building 14 Tarn, John Nelson 57, 66, 67 Tarry, M.J. 85 Tavistock Repertory theatre 117 Tecton 126 Telford Homes 157 Tenants’ Management Organisations (TMOs) 105 terraced housing 18, 109, 178–9, 188–90 see also Battersea, Victorian; Minet Estate, Lambeth thermal-comfort retrofits see sustainable retrofit Three Sisters, Battersea 45–6, 46 Tidey Street, Poplar 131, 135, 136–7, 136 Till, Jeremy 166–7, 173 Time Out 143 Times, The 61, 87, 112, 118, 134, 143 Todd, George, Junior 44 Tory Reform Group 101 tower blocks 14, 131–2, 132

INDEX Battersea 50, 52, 54 Ronan Point 124, 137, 138, 139 South Acton 99–101, 99, 102 see also Balfron Tower Tower Hamlets 75 Tower Hamlets Borough Council 151, 159–60, 161 Town and Country Planning Association 101 Toye, Samuel 84 ‘traditional urbanism’ 168, 169, 174 Trafalgar House 89 Trellick Tower, Poplar 14, 145, 159 triple-glazed windows 180, 183 Tsuruta Architects 185–6, 186 Tudor Walters Report (1918) 12 Twentieth Century Society 160 United Women’s Homes Association 95–6 Unwin, Raymond 12, 95 Urban Splash 188, 189 Venice Charter (1966) 182 Venner Lucas architects 183, 184, 184 Vertical Living Debate 133–4 Victoria Street Properties Ltd 84 Victoria Street, Westminster 77 Victorian period 3, 7, 9–12, 196 South Acton 94–5, 94, 95 see also Battersea, Victorian; Minet Estate, Lambeth; Peabody Estates; sustainable retrofit Villa Savoye 171 Wager, David 117 Wagstaff, James 110, 118 Wainwright, Oliver 55 Walker, Cyril 125–6 Walker, David 4 Walker, Peter 118 Waltham Forest 138 Wand, J.W.C. 97 Wandsworth Council 44–5, 46, 49, 52, 53 Warburton, Nigel 147 Ward, Colin 14–15, 101, 105 Wardle, Tony 120 warehouse conversions 15

Waterlow, Sydney 9, 83 Watkin, David 173 Watson, Isobel 83 Watson, Margaret 114 Weightman, Gavin 171–2 Wellington Buildings, Chelsea Bridge Road 84 Wellington Court, Knightsbridge 78 Wells, H.G. 81 West Ham 137 West London Extension Railway 44 Western Ground Rents 114–16, 120–1 Western Mansions Ltd 85 Westminster 66, 68, 68, 71, 77, 78, 78, 138 Westminster City Council 126, 127 Wharncliffe Dwelling Company 85 Whichcord, John 77 White, William H. 77, 79 Whitechapel Peabody Estate 67, 72–3, 73 Whitfield Lewis, H.J. 131, 136 Whitfield, William 133 Wilkinson, Fanny Rollo 31 Willett, William 95 William Cubitt and Co 57, 63, 71, 72 Williams, P.R. 114 Williams, Raymond 165 Williams, William Henry 43 Willmott, Peter 134 Wilson, Harold 139 Winham, Cyril 114, 115 Winham, Francis B. 114, 115, 116 Winstanley Estate, Battersea 50, 52 Witherington, Walter Seckham 79 Witley Court, Bloomsbury 86 Wix’s Lane, Battersea 42 Wood, Thomas 45–6 Woodberry Down Estate, Stoke Newington 98, 125, 126 Woodhouse, George 69 Woolf Court, South Acton 97 Woolwich 15 Woolwich Borough Council 12 Woolwich Mutual Benefit Building Society 43 working-class housing 11 housing; Peabody Estates inter-war period 111 231

MOBILISING HOUSING HISTORIES Victorian period 60, 77, 94, 95, 95, 96 see also Battersea, Victorian; council housing; high-rise Wren, Christopher 8 Wylde, Henry 81–2 Yates, Katharine 151–2 Young, Michael 134, 172–3 Young, Sir George 100, 101 Young, William 77, 78 Zeilenbau (parallel slab blocks) 98, 126 Zero Carbon House, Balsall Heath, Birmingham 190, 190 zero carbon negative 190

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IMAGE CREDITS CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER FOUR

p20 Reproduced by permission of Lambeth Archives, archive reference number: MEA, IV/83/3/1/7; p22 Map by David Kroll with 1916 OS map underlay and based on lease records in Lambeth Archives, MEA, IV/83/3/1/18; p24 Map by David Kroll with 1916 OS Map underlay based on description in Parson & Bamford lease; p25 © David Kroll; p27 Map by David Kroll with 1916 OS map underlay based on lease records, MEA, IV/83/1/1/8/1, Collissons & Dawes, ‘Miss Susan Minet to Peter Brissault Minet Esq. and Others: Conveyance of Miss Minet’s Camberwell Estate’, 1 June 1952; p29 © David Kroll; p30 Reproduced by permission of Lambeth Archives; p32 © David Kroll; p33 top © David Kroll bottom Reproduced by permission of Lambeth Archives, archive reference number: MEA, IV/83/3/1

p78 top © RIBA Collections bottom © Richard Dennis; p79 © Richard Dennis; p81 drawing by Helen Jones; p82 Reproduced by permission of Westminster City Archives; p83 © Richard Dennis p86; drawing by Helen Jones; p87 drawing by Helen Jones from an original map in The Ideal London Home, 1933; p89 © Richard Dennis

CHAPTER TWO p38 © Historic England Archive; p39 © Roger Armstrong; p40 Wandsworth Heritage Service, Battersea Library; p41 top London Metropolitan Archives bottom drawing by Helen Jones; p42 © Colin Thom; p44 top Wandsworth Heritage Service, Battersea Library bottom © Historic England Archive; p 46 Wandsworth Heritage Service, Battersea Library; p47 From The Graphic, 28 Nov 1874, p. 513; p48 Wandsworth Heritage Service, Battersea Library; p50 © Henk Snoek / RIBA Collections; p51 Photograph by John Maltby/London Metropolitan Archives, City of London (SC/PHL/01/034)

CHAPTER THREE p58 Peabody Trust Archive; p59 Photo by Irina Davidovici; p63 Redrawn by Helen Jones; p64 London Metropolitan Archives, City of London Archive ref. ACC/3445/PT/08 016; p66 Photo by Irina Davidovici; p67 top Redrawn by Helen Jones bottom London Metropolitan Archives, City of London Collage/ Ref. SC_PHL_01_505_68_1979; p68 Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections; p69 Photo by Irina Davidovici; p73 Photo by Irina Davidovici

CHAPTER FIVE p92 reproduced by permission of Historic England Archive [RAF Photography]; p93 Planning Officers Society; p94 Ealing Local History Centre; p95 Ealing Local History Centre; p97 top and bottom © Historic England Archive; p98 © Historic England Archive; p99 Ealing Local History Centre; p102 © Historic England Archive; p104 © Peter Guillery

CHAPTER SIX p108 drawing by Helen Jones; p109 © Tanis Hinchcliffe; p110 © Tanis Hinchcliffe; p115 © Tanis Hinchcliffe; p116 © Tanis Hinchcliffe; p117 © Tanis Hinchcliffe; p118 © Tanis Hinchcliffe

CHAPTER SEVEN p127 top © Simon Pepper bottom Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections; p128 drawing by Helen Jones; p129 London Metropolitan Archives; p130 London Metropolitan Archives; p131 top and bottom London Metropolitan Archives; p132 University of Liverpool, Sidney Jones Library; p136 London Metropolitan Archives; p137 London Metropolitan Archives

CHAPTER EIGHT p142 © RIBA Collections; p146 © RIBA Collections; p148 Hulton Archive/Daily Express/Getty Images; p149 Used with kind permission of Louis Hellman; p151 Hulton Archive/Daily Express/Getty Images; p153 © David Roberts; p154 drawings by Helen Jones; p156 top and bottom © David Roberts 233

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CHAPTER TEN p181 top © Mark Zudini bottom © Alan Williams, alanwilliamsphotography.com; p184 top and bottom © Susan Venner, Venner Lucas Architects; p185 top © Harry Paticas, Arboreal Architecture bottom © Justin Bere, bere:architects; p186 © Tim Crocker; p187 © Assemble Studio; p189 © Martine Hamilton Knight/Builtvision

CHAPTER ELEVEN p194 top and bottom © Simon Hudspith; p195 top left and right © Simon Hudspith; p196 © Simon Hudspith; p197 top Panter Hudspith Architects bottom photograph by Keith Collie; p198 top photograph by Enrique Verdugo p199 photograph by Morley von Sternberg

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