Hope VI – or go away you’re poor II
September 1st, 2011
UPDATE 22/9/17: Now it’s Choice Neighbourhoods HT @robbins_glyn
Everything that’s happening here now with so called regeneration has been happening in the USA before with the Hope VI programme and all its negative consequences which boil down to a net loss of housing for the poor.
Some have criticized the new developments, because they do not require a “one-for-one” replacement of the old housing unit—the new unit does not have to house the same number of tenants, which results in a net loss of housing for the poor.[11]
Some critics have said that local authorities use the program as a legal means to evict poor residents in favor of more affluent residents in a process of gentrification.[13][15] They have said that less than 12% of those displaced from old housing eventually move into the replacement housing.[9][10][13]
Wikipedia? Ok I’m desperate.
The first article in the series linked below:-
Needs based allocations – Robin Wales
August 30th, 2011
UPDATE: 16/6/11 Dave Hill has an interesting article today in the Guardian on the same theme, that needs based allocations are a disaster for council housing allocation:-
Newham-mayor-plans-olympic-regeneration
Charities condemn plans to let councils house locals before immigrants
https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/home/home/big-ideas-32075
Old link – Man on a mission
https://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2003/nov/30/housing.uknews
City of Towers – Christopher Booker – BBC 1979
August 27th, 2011
City of Towers is a two hour documentary made by Christopher Booker for the BBC, first broadcast in 1979 and a master class in the history of Modernism that covers its birth from ideas first put forward by Antonio Sant’Elia, Auguste Perret and Le Corbusier in the early part of the Twentieth Century . . .
. . . to its fall from grace in the latter part of the same century when its supposed beneficiaries, the people who had to live in the concrete blocks that followed the Modernist model, rebelled, and it came to be seen for what it truly was, a failed philosophy.
City of Towers – Christopher Booker BBC 1979 – film notes
August 26th, 2011
Footnotes (by blog author while writing it up)
“Under a perpetual blanket of smoke”
Ebenezer Howard – Letchworth. The Garden City 1903
Tony Garnier – What is a city for – zoning 1904
Skyscrapers early years of C20th
H.G.Wells – The Sleeper Awakes 1898 – London in 2100
Italian futurists – machines
Antonio Sant’Elia – A manifesto of a futurist architecture 1914
Russian Revolution – large buildings, skyscrapers from communism
Manhattan skyline – skyscrapers from capitalists
Germany – Mies van der Roe & Walter Gropius
August Perret – City of Towers – early 1920s
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret – Le Corbusier (crow like) – early 1920s
“Towards a new architecture” – Corbusier – 1923
“The City of Tomorrow” – Corbusier – 1925
This stupendous vision – an entirely new kind of society
Fritz Lang – Metropolis “as the most appalling nightmare” – 1920s
CIAM – avant garde architects on a Mediterranean cruise in 1933
Comprehensive Estate Initiative – research notes
August 25th, 2011
UPDATE: 21/11/16 Buy the book – “The Dynamics of Local Housing Policy” by Keith Jacobs. (At the time of writing available second hand for £22.52 – 21/11/16) HT @municipaldreams
In the early 1990s I would periodically return from a long trip overseas to notice fewer and fewer tower blocks standing on an estate once well known to me as a carpenter with the GLC . . .
Read Hansard on Trowbridge
. . . I would drive past on the Eastway and the Trowbridge Estate would have lost a couple more of its tower blocks. I began to forget how many there were to start with.
Opposite, between Eastway and the factories along the railway and the cut, the G.L.C.’s Trowbridge estate left only the north-south line of Osborne and Prince Edward roads from the centre of the old street pattern. First opened in 1965 and completed in 1969, the estate included 117 bungalow homes but was most striking for its seven 21-storeyed towers, (fn. 68) with mosaic facings and glass balconies.
From Here to Modernity
August 22nd, 2011
Click image to see full Wordle
Kirsty Wark charts the rise and fall of the Modern movement from the 1930s to its fall from popularity, in three half hour programmes made for the Open University.
Here follows a comprehensive list of the buildings featured in the programme, in the form of stills. It is not by any means a review of the programme but rather intended as an introduction by way of showing the content.
Title shot – click above for larger image
The link to the Open University details about the series is here:-
Ferrier Kidbrooke – death of a housing ideal
August 19th, 2011
Welcome to the Ferrier Kidbrooke estate, this is was the view as you leave left the station.
Bottom centre, a row of shops, much diminished now owing to lack of custom because the estate is mostly empty. Bottom right the corner of a poster put up by the developers, Berkeley Homes for the new Kidbrooke Village.
Brief history of housing in C20th
August 18th, 2011
The history is pretty straightforward if depressing in that before the war large amounts of housing throughout the country were unfit for human habitation and had been built during the industrial revolution to the standards of the time which for working people were often what the employer could get away with.
The 1930s was seen as a time to start clearing the slums and large housing blocks such as Quarry Hill in Leeds and Gerard Gardens and others were built in Liverpool, it’s worth seeing the film Homes for Workers to see what was being done at that time.
After the war the Modernists had their chance to rebuild the housing of Britain and in addition to many houses with gardens large numbers of flats were built often on estates, with varying degrees of success, let’s not forget the new towns either.
Unfortunately the situation in the inner cities was less good. London had much new housing built but this fell short of that required leaving many people trapped in poor quality privately rented accommodation with the scandal of Rachmanism that marked the early 1960s.
With families being broken up by social services if they became homeless, the film Cathy Come Home by Ken Loach was a cry for help for those families so troubled and led, ten years on to a change in the law such that council homes were no longer allocated to those who could show good references and a record of employment, but rather to those most in need.
While a worthy aim the long term effect of this policy when combined with the inevitable effects of right to buy has been to create sink estates where in earlier decades lived a range of people of all backgrounds.
Which brings us back to Ferrier. From the podcast linked below we learn that former inmates of the asylums were housed in small numbers on Ferrier and there was of course the compounding effect of right to buy where those who could afford to bought and moved out, letting the property, often to recipients of benefits. Some who could not afford to but bought anyway, defaulted and had their homes repossessed thus losing their security of tenure and reverting to the bottom of the waiting list, and lastly those left behind who could not afford to buy even with the discount.
UPDATE: This gives a good account of public housing in the last century:-
Finsbury Health Centre – Lubetkin 1938
August 16th, 2011
UPDATE: 28th November 2014 Tonight at the Royal Geological Society John Allan gave a superb address in support of FHC and won the vote for best C20th Society building on their 100 buildings list. Tweet.
The Borough of Finsbury is notable for having a number of buildings by the same architectural practice, in this case Tecton a spin off from the MARS group of architects (Modern Architecture Research Group) formed in the 1930s by a group of forward looking Modernist architects seeking to make their mark.
Heygate Estate – Elephant & Castle
August 16th, 2011
Thought for the day – Regeneration is social cleansing
In my continuing quest for béton brut (raw concrete) I wandered along to what’s left of the Heygate to snatch a few shots.
