From Utopia to slum

26/09/1998

Britain's housing estates were conceived as one of the great exercises in social idealism. Yet some of them are now so run down that they may have to be demolished. The former director of Leeds Polytechnic looks at what went wrong. Last week the Prime Minister unveiled an ?800 million 20-year campaign to transform the worst of Britain's run-down areas ? the sink estates. There are said to be 4,000 of them, hit by a downward spiral of crime, drugs, empty houses and vandalism. The Government is calling its strategy for improving them Bringing Britain together. Certainly we may come together to watch their demolition.

What has gone wrong? Twentieth-century housing was the product of a revolution in architectural thinking. Modern architecture was not to be the architecture of cathedrals and mansions and civic buildings; the peak of modern architectural endeavour was to be the housing of the common man and woman. It was a great social adventure. What could possibly be more important?

I was an architecture student in those post-war years, when modern architecture seemed to have reached its maturity. Such was our commitment to the new social ideal that when we got married my wife and I bought a couple of rooms in an Edinburgh tenement. There, hard up, we lived the kind of Christian life that we could afford, without pretence. The Dominican friar who married us thought that was right. There were no bathrooms in the tenement and we shared a lavatory. From our room and kitchen in the slum we read with approval about the development of a healthy housing policy.

And it seemed that the country had found the right civilised approach. Unlike France and Germany, where social housing usually meant massive blocks and endless terraces, Britain adopted a more humane policy. The London County Council (LCC), under its chief architect Robert Matthew, built the first tower block in east London and then a more complete catalogue of housing types at Roehampton in south-west London. It was called mixed development. At Roehampton, in two phases ? the first influenced by Scandinavian examples and the second by Le Corbusier's urban experiments ? the LCC acquired an international reputation. The range of housing types included 11-storey tower blocks, five-storey slab blocks with balconies, four-storey maisonettes, two-storey terrace houses, and single-storey cottages for the elderly. They would cater for many different kinds and age of tenant.

The LCC had a history of social housing between the wars, and after the Second World War it had produced two standard types of estate ? the cottage estates, in mature landscapes like Roehampton, and the flatted estates of five-storey blocks in more urban areas. Now in pioneering mixed development it had taken another giant step ? at a density of 120 people per acre, later increased to 200, it was possible to meet some of the housing demand and create an attractive environment at the same time.

Britain had, after all, a great history of improvements. There was the slum clearance of the 1930s. Then came the development of the standard family house of three bedrooms ? parents, boys and girls. There were the garden city movement, and the experiments in philanthropic housing in great cities by socially conscious industrialists and philanthropists like Peabody. The story was a proud one.

So what went wrong? Why were so many tall blocks with crowded lay-outs built when it was known that most people preferred cottages with a piece of land?

A major factor was simply the demand. The then city architect for Birmingham told me that when he took over the job the city was building 2,000 houses a year with a waiting list for 60,000. Councillors wanted to assure people that houses could be built quickly ? which meant tower blocks. In Birmingham there were 429 of them.

Birmingham was not alone. Up to the beginning of the 1970s, when policy changed and tower blocks became unpopular, England and Wales had 4,600 of them, mostly in the big cities. Central government provided subsidies for the extra costs in building high. How could a council resist?

One at least did. The chairman of the housing committee in York rejected the subsidy and refused to build high; there are no tower blocks in York. But by the time the policy had changed (influenced by the partial collapse of a tower block at Ronan Point, London, in 1968), no fewer than one and a half million people were living in tower blocks. The time needed for careful thinking and planning somehow got lost. What counted in erecting these and other types of mass housing was speed. More dwellings meant more votes. The primary aim of the developers, including the local authorities responsible for housing, was not quality but numbers. Several events changed the profile of housing but without solving the underlying problems. One of the first policy changes effected by Margaret Thatcher when she became Prime Minister was the Housing Act of 1980, which gave the tenants in council property the right to buy their home. Within five years a million council and new town dwellings had been sold. It was the sale of the century.

At almost the same time, in 1985, Alice Coleman published Utopia on Trial, a sweeping condemnation of local authority housing and central government policy. The report set out a list of disastrous characteristics: the large number of children in care; the vandalism, graffiti and excrement that defiled the buildings. Most strongly criticised were slab blocks with access to flats by way of long balconies which were an almost open invitation to criminals ? a muggers' paradise.

It was not so much the density of people to the acre in the high-rise estates that changed the attitude of the tenants and led to the condemnation of much social housing, but rather the design of the dwellings, and their management and maintenance. Long galleries may have been attractive to the architects, but they were dangerous. The most successful were the streets in the sky at Parkhill in Sheffield, which were wider than the usual balconies and able to take electric trolleys for deliveries; the idea was that they would become community meeting places, as streets in the industrial cities had been. In the tower blocks the most frequent complaint was not so much crowding as the failure of the lifts.

The architect responsible for housing in London told me that from the start it was intended that every tower block would have a concierge responsible for the management and maintenance of the fabric ? a guarantee of security and of regular maintenance. The cancellation of such jobs was a fatal blow. It is not possible to build and manage a modern housing estate without regular expenditure.

Is it possible to save the sink estates? Architectural design cannot solve the problem by itself. There have, of course, been cases where an architect's dream of creating a monument to himself has left us with monstrous buildings. Some of those blocks ? like those erected later above the Parkhill estate in Sheffield ? have already been demolished. But usually the problem had to do more with community than with the building itself.

Some tower blocks ? in Birmingham, for example ? have become admirable dwellings for the elderly, after reorganisation of management so as to provide a warden for each of them. More could become so, provided improvements are made to provide common rooms on the ground floor, efficient security and the assurance that the lifts will work.

But fundamentally the rescue of sink estates requires social concern and community development. As the Catholic Housing Aid Society has said, in welcoming the Government's public commitment to tackling the poorest neighbourhoods, there is a need for integrated local and national action in the regeneration of communities: Removing buildings is easy. Rebuilding communities is much harder.

Taken in that context, the money promised by the Government is not very much, and certainly not enough by itself. People in these estates must be consulted and involved if their homes and the environment in which they live are to be improved. In the final analysis housing means homes for people, preferably with the people in charge.