London has a long history of innovation and experimentation with the design of social housing, going back to the Boundary Estate in Bethnal Green which, was completed by the London County Council in 1893. Since then, architects have worked in different styles, used different materials and created different living arrangements. Many would agree with Ted Hollamby’s vision for Lambeth: ‘We all accept that we are not just dealing with housing as such. We are building a community’. Thus, because of the need for more social housing, London’s skyline was, and in many places still is, dominated by the high density point blocks and towers of municipal housing.
London Estates sets out to record 275 examples of the range of estates built in all 32 London boroughs and the City of London between 1946 and1981. There is no attempt to categorise or group them by date or style, but the five-page opening commentary does provide a historical context and highlights those reflecting the highest design quality. The selection of images varies from the mundane, standard post-war council housing to the world-class and now listed estates, such as Powell & Moya’s Churchill Gardens (1952-57), Darbourne & Darke’s Lillington Gardens (1969-72) (both in Westminster) and Neave Brown’s Rowley Way in Camden (1972-79).
Thaddeus Zupancic clearly has a personal interest in modern architecture and has worked for some time with the Twentieth Century Society. Before he moved to London in 1991, he studied comparative literature at the Ljubljana University’s Faculty of Arts. It can be assumed that he took all the photos, although no credits are identified.
Clearly London faced a massive task of rehousing its population after the war. Almost 710,000 buildings had been damaged and over 52,000 destroyed. And that was before the juggernaut of slum clearance got under way. The London County Council and the 28 metropolitan borough councils and City of London all had powers to build new housing. In the early post-war years much of this could at best be described as ‘undistinguished’ leading to pressure to set up an LCC Architects’ Department in 1949. The LCC’s Architect to the Council, Robert Matthew, formed a Housing Division which later had a staff of 250 made up of smaller, semi-autonomous teams. The scale of the task required and the relative freedom to experiment in an uncompromising modernist aesthetic led one commentator to describe the Department as the ‘foremost architectural practice in the world’.
Some of the smaller boroughs also developed a good track record in public housing, although until 1965 only five had appointed borough architects. Some of these stood out as inspirational, such as Sydney Cook in Camden or Alf Head in Islington, in designing or commissioning others to produce some of the best public housing in London. Between 1965-1980 the borough of Islington won the most awards for good design in housing.
The author notes that the design of public housing was strongly influenced by the 1949 Housing Manual and the Parker Morris floor space standards, which were set out in a Ministry of Housing design bulletin in 1963. These remained the cornerstone of good practice until they were abolished in the Thatcher era in 1980. In the 1950s and ‘60s Government subsidies increasingly favoured high-rise development as well as the use of system-built methods. Public opinion rapidly turned against the latter after the collapse of the Ronan Point block in Newham in 1968 when four people were killed. Many of the boroughs and GLC began to favour the acquisition and rehabilitation of street properties, which also proved popular with their residents.
The Housing Act 1980 introduced the Right to Buy and reduced government subsidies for social housing. The number of new social homes produced rapidly declined and the housing association movement was not able to fill the gap. Promises that the receipts from housing sales would be used to provide equivalent numbers of new housing never materialised. For the next 45 years, affordability, growing waiting lists and the lack of adequate maintenance became serious political issues. Today, many local authorities are gearing up to build new estates and it can only be hoped that the lessons from the past will have been learnt and in 30 years we will be celebrating a new round of innovation and quality design.
The estates pictured in this book are all very well illustrated and each one no doubt represents a major achievement of planning, design and construction. One further observation should be noted: There are too many featureless stretches of lawn or rough ground with no obvious use or landscaping surrounding many of the estates. Was it Ian Nairn who invented the term Surplus Land After Planning (SLOAP), because it’s still very much in evidence?
This book is an excellent record of 35 years of municipal housing in London. As the author concludes: ‘Council housing often hidden in plain sight, is arguably the greatest gift that architects have bequeathed London. Just as importantly, it has contributed immeasurably to not only the architectural, but also the social fabric of the capital’.
