Single Aspect Blog

“High living in a council owned tower block is stigmatised, living in a privately rented or owned tower block is the ultimate in urban chic” – The Gentrification Reader

I lived at 93 Aragon Tower on the Pepys Estate Deptford between October 1978 and September 1980, in a scissor maisonette. It was the highlight of my life so far at that point because I had spent the previous few years living in a succession of seedy bedsits, shared houses and other people’s flats. One bright and sunny weekday morning I parked my employer’s pink and purple Austin J4 on the bridge that runs over the (former) Surrey Canal in Oxestalls Road and went into the housing office at the foot of Eddystone Tower for the keys to a hard to let flat in Aragon Tower.

10/1978-9/1980

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These are just a few well known but random examples. There are many more scattered across the UK so if you’re planning a tour by all means include these but please don’t think that this list is exhaustive, far from it, these are but a few and Heygate, Ferrier and Aylesbury are fast disappearing from view thanks to regeneration.

Alton West Roehampton

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Thanks to a member of  Sheffield City Council myself and a friend were allowed access to 187 Norwich Row to see what living conditions are like there.

Click image for panorama from kitchen balcony
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This will become an article at some point but just for now enjoy the pictures.  Two large panoramas of Gleadless Valley and its housing. The same series of photographs but saved at different resolutions.

Panoramic 11764 x 1330 pixels 2.21Mb in size >click here<

Panoramic 23528 x 2660 pixels 7.75Mb in size >click here<

My Gleadless Valley photos on Flickr:-  Gleadless Valley photos here

https://www.welivehere.co.uk/valley_brit_print.html

What a breath of fresh air has blown through the dusty corridors of Single Aspect House today with the arrival of this week’s BD Online and a letter addressing all the problems of sink estates and other denigrated social housing.  I have no idea whether the author is a housing professional or simply a former council tenant but Steven Bee runs Steven Bee Urban Counsel His letter speaks volumes about the approach required to return to the heady days of the 1970s when so many lived in council housing without the scale of the problems apparent today.

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The last couple of years have  seen a plethora of articles about the lack of new house building and Andrew Rawnsley tackles the subject in some depth in today’s Observer.

The social housing sold off by Mrs Thatcher was never replaced. House building in the last year of Gordon Brown fell to a postwar low. We are currently building around 100,000 homes a year when new household formation is running at about 250,000.

https://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/05/andrew-rawnsley-house-prices-construction

This all ties in with my other articles on right to buy and the sink estates but there is no sign of any political party even beginning to tackle this important issue anytime soon and worse now is the pressure on the outer boroughs of London as the housing benefit cuts begin to be felt forcing people in both council and private rented housing from the centre.

Karen Buck spoke eloquently on Thursday evening at the Barking and Dagenham CLP with a talk about the likely effects of the HB cuts, and will do so again on the 11th June at the London Labour Housing Group policy day.  There’s still time to book.

For over thirty years I have lived with the memory of this excellent documentary City of Towers and just occasionally I have a glimmer of hope that it will be shown again.  Today the page was visited by somebody at the BBC.

A visitor from webgw3.thls.bbc.co.uk (132.185.240.123)
arrived from www.google.co.uk“WHERE WE LIVE NOW:1:CITY OF TOWERS” 1-10,
and visited www.singleaspect.org.uk/doc/CityofTowers.htm
at 11:12:06 on Thursday, March 10, 2011.

A visitor from webgw3.thls.bbc.co.uk (132.185.240.123)
arrived from www.google.co.uk“WHERE WE LIVE NOW:1:CITY OF TOWERS” 1-10,
and visited www.singleaspect.org.uk/doc/wwln.php
at 11:11:49 on Thursday, March 10, 2011.

If you have a copy of this film and are willing to show it, even as a private showing please get in touch.  This film was a landmark of its time in revealing the inadequacies and destruction wrought by an over enthusiastic application of Modernism to housing and city centres and the history that was destroyed in the process.  Christopher Booker was one of the first to recognise the damage being done.

UPDATE: I now have a copy of this film, read more about it at the following page:-

https://www.singleaspect.org.uk/doc/wwln.php

If you read nothing else today read Red Brick on Cameron’s attitude to the homeless.  Thatcher MkII.

https://redbrickblog.wordpress.com/2011/02/03/the-revolving-door-for-homeless-people/

I can still remember central London during the 1970s with few to no visible homeless people and then the way the subway between Charing Cross Station and the north side of the Strand filled up every night after midnight as the 1980s wore on, and doorways began to be occupied by the young (16 to 18) in Salvation Army sleeping bags (YTS, family breakdown and all that).

I think the Tory philosophy of today on housing might reasonably be summed up as “we’re ok, you can ffffffffffffffind a cardboard box”.

With one exception; at least Boris has had the balls to pursue housing standards and for that I admire him, for the rest of them, the sooner the coalition falls and we have a general election the better.

Fifty years ago politicians of all creeds were falling over themselves to build 300,000 homes a year and now, when they’re more needed than ever, and it would help pull the country out of recession, there they sit on their hands doing nothing and worse, pulling out the rug from under the few people who have a subsidised home and forcing them into private rented accommodation.

This is Cathy Come Home writ large.

If you disagree there’s a comment box below.

This article started off as a comment on the need for prefab homes as a solution to the housing crisis brought about by the reluctance of Governments since 1979 to build council housing.  In the process of reading the article I came across the graph below which shows the true state of housing for those who cannot afford to buy their own, and it is truly shocking.

Of course the idea of prefabs has been superceded now by Levitt Bernstein and their Beds in Sheds. https://www.singleaspect.org.uk/?p=11852 let’s hope somebody starts building proper housing before too long.