{"id":123643,"date":"2025-11-09T07:27:34","date_gmt":"2025-11-09T07:27:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/123643\/"},"modified":"2025-11-09T07:27:34","modified_gmt":"2025-11-09T07:27:34","slug":"repopulating-the-high-rises-new-statesman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/123643\/","title":{"rendered":"Repopulating the high-rises – New Statesman"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are few, if any, forms of dwelling so thick with ideological, political and aesthetic baggage as the high-rise block. For the political right, the usual story, firmly set with the publication of Alice Coleman\u2019s eviscerating book Utopia on Trial in 1985, is one of abject failure. For them, modernist social housing demonstrates not only the inevitable failure of midcentury state-centred planning, but more specifically of high modernist urban design itself \u2013 responsible for the rise of crime and antisocial behaviour in urban \u201csink estates\u201d. What began with the architect Le Corbusier\u2019s idea of a house as a \u201cmachine for living in\u201d, as well as his technocratic faith in the ability of buildings to remake the social world, ends with feral children tearing through dogshit-infested concrete monstrosities. Nor was it just the utopia of housing that was on trial; it was state provision in general. Whatever the answer to this modernist failure is, whether defensible urban space or Little Englander fantasies of Poundbury-style new urbanism, it most certainly is not council-owned and managed.<\/p>\n

Parts of the left, on the other hand, have a no less fixed narrative. Here, encapsulated by Sheffield\u2019s imposing Park Hill estate, with its famous communal streets in the sky, as well as Ern\u0151 Goldfinger\u2019s celebrated blocks like Trellick Tower in Kensal Town, and Balfron Tower in Poplar, is the story of modernist dreaming punctured by state betrayal and mendacity. While the failings of some blocks are noted, not least many of the poorly constructed, system-built high-rises of the 1960s, this is ultimately a tale of state neglect. The key moment was Right to Buy, established in 1980, under which council homes were sold to tenants at steep reductions while budgets for the construction of new council housing was slashed. From the dream of good quality housing for all, we are left with the privatised and financialised hell of modern British housing.<\/p>\n

There is of course a different story to be told, one usually forgotten or ignored. It isn\u2019t the tale of the bricks and mortar, the prefabricated slabs and weathered rendering, that is important, but the people who call estates home. It is a story told by the writer and oral historian Tony Parker, who in the early 1980s went to live among the residents of a housing estate in south London. Through 49 interviews, by turns joyous and heartbreaking, published in 1983 as The People of Providence, the physical fabric of the estate is only ever given passing glances, as stage sets for the rich social and personal lives of its residents.<\/p>\n

What do they know of architecture who only architecture know, Parker seems to ask. That question also guides Up in the Air, an elegant and insightful book by the urban historian Holly Smith. Smith begins her quietly iconoclastic study with the debates between the advocates of garden cities and the pushers of municipal flats in the interwar years, but it finds its form with the story of Park Hill, a vast edifice of raised interconnected blocks and walkways that looms over Sheffield city centre. Its four blocks, containing nearly a thousand homes, were built early in the postwar boom in high-rise building which reached its peak in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Park Hill has long been celebrated for its attempt to preserve the communities of the pre-existing slums it replaced with modern flats and maisonettes. But this, Smith says, both simplifies and mystifies the estate.<\/p>\n

In reality, the estate was less an attempt to preserve or reconstruct an existing working-class community than refound one on more respectable lines. The original site was nicknamed \u201cLittle Chicago\u201d due to its reputation for crime and violence, and according to the architectural critic Reyner Banham, who was a frequent visitor to Sheffield\u2019s City Architect\u2019s office during the 1950s, the aim of the new project was to \u201cdestroy\u201d this constituency: \u201cto extirpate them, and destroy their lairs\u201d. Only 52 per cent of the Park Hill\u2019s residents came from the city\u2019s slum clearance areas and, in contrast with its later mythology, no streets were moved in wholesale.<\/p>\n

If Park Hill exemplifies the technocratic nature of the postwar welfare state, an extension of an \u201colder liberal-paternalist model of social security\u201d rather than one \u201cforged in the mould of a revolutionary social universalism\u201d, then Ronan Point, in Newham in east London, demonstrates the deeper structural failings of many of Britain\u2019s high-rise estates. In the early morning of 16 May 1968, an explosion caused by a gas leak on the 18th floor caused the entire south-east column of the building to collapse like a house of cards. Five people died and 17 were injured \u2013 figures which would have been orders of magnitude higher had the explosion not occurred while most residents were asleep.<\/p>\n

The building, one of nine identical blocks built during the late 1960s on the Freemason\u2019s Estate in Canning Town, was constructed using the Larsen-Nielsen system of mass produced, prefabricated components that were assembled on site. These system-built blocks answered the need that many councils had for the rapid construction of mass housing at scale. In 1967, system building constituted some 47 per cent of public housing tender approvals.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Treat yourself or a friend this Christmas to a New Statesman subscription from \u00a32 per month<\/p>\n

In the aftermath of the disaster, high-rise social housing itself as much as the shoddy construction methods of the system builders was castigated, and Ronan Point still figures as a central case in many indictments of high-rise social housing. The actual deficiencies of the building, rooted in the worst excesses of public-private profiteering, unsurprisingly get far less of an airing.<\/p>\n

Between the two poles of modernist enthusiasm and conservative denunciation sit the residents themselves. Smith\u2019s book recounts the attempts of people in blocks across the country to wrest some control of their homes from the hands of the technocrats. One estate, St Katharine\u2019s Estate in Wapping, east London, was saved from demolition in the 1970s and became the core of a radical experiment in tenant control of council housing. Later, there emerged the National Tower Blocks Network which began after a series of scandals of shoddy construction and which campaigned for better fire safety measures.<\/p>\n

If Ronan Point and the examples of community activism that Smith recounts demonstrate many of the problems generated by the mass construction of municipal housing during the postwar years, then Mrs Thatcher\u2019s Right to Buy is often seen as the obvious, and perhaps only, solution. Thatcher\u2019s stated aim was the creation of a \u201cproperty-owning democracy\u201d, in which \u2013 via the mechanisms of the market \u2013 people would finally have freedom from a haughty and distant state. The result, as John Major \u2013 minister for housing, inner cities and construction in the early 1990s \u2013 claimed was \u201cthe end of tenants as passive dependents watched over \u2013 or ignored \u2013 by patriarchal landlords\u201d.<\/p>\n

What actually emerged was something far different, and worse. At the core of Smith\u2019s book is the idea that the postwar decades saw a decline of deference. As working-class affluence grew, and as the welfare state became entrenched in the lives of ordinary people, a conjoined sense of both grievance and optimism emerged. And as people began to expect more, the shortcomings of the welfare state became key sites of struggle. This produced, as Smith notes, \u201ca powerful, if complex, structure of feeling\u201d. Yet if people wanted the deficiencies of the welfare state corrected \u2013 whether structural, managerial, or both \u2013 what they got was Thatcherite privatisation and Blairite regeneration. While Ronan Point was once seen as the gravestone of the welfare state, the demolished and socially cleansed estates of Elephant and Castle and the scorched remains of Grenfell Tower ought to be the same for the new reality of Britain\u2019s housing sector.<\/p>\n

I write this while looking out of my window over the balcony on the 15th floor of a 1960s slab block. To my left sits the Barbican estate at the edge of the City of London, a vast and celebrated landmark of tower blocks and raised walkways, built from coarse concrete and a with a large arts complex at its centre. Just behind the estate\u2019s central tower pokes St Paul\u2019s Cathedral, framing the city\u2019s financial heart. To my right is something different, a relatively new sight: seeming to smash their way out of the ground are a number of slim-point blocks, clad in glass and steel, stretching high into the air. Where the concrete estates of the 1960s and 1970s, like the one in which I live, were based on an ultimately flawed and top-down model of provision, the newly rising high-rise blocks have exclusion built into their very fabric, from their meagre allocation of affordable units to their notorious \u201cpoor doors\u201d \u2013 separate entrances for social tenants.<\/p>\n

Between the three \u2013 the modernist sprawl, the council block in which I live, and the new landscape of massive, private towers whose monotonous form litters cities across the world \u2013 lies a history of housing in postwar Britain. To this, Smith\u2019s book offers a superb guide. But perhaps more than that, it shows a world in which people have struggled for decent, well-built and affordable housing. From this we all must learn.<\/p>\n

Up in the Air: A History of High Rise Britain
Holly Smith
Verso, 304pp, \u00a320<\/p>\n

Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops<\/p>\n

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