Single Aspect Blog

UPDATE: Following the release of the BBC archive series Post War Architecture I am now able to point out that the first audio clip quoted in the programme below is taken from the opening seconds of Architecture at the crossroads : Doubt and Reassessment

“If one had to choose one symbol of the very worst kind of modern architectural crime it would surely be the crumbling housing estate. Its walls covered in graffiti, its windows smashed, its windy courtyards covered in litter, and its residents living in perpetual fear of muggers and thieves.” Meridian – Architectural Murder – 1986 – BBC World Service – listen here at 28 mins long Architectural Murder

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A related BBC radio programme may be heard at the link below:-

Analysis: Labours New New Jerusalem

Things we forgot to remember – Michael Portillo – BBC Radio 4

The 1945 Labour Government
Monday 11 December 2006 20:00-20:30 (Radio 4 FM)
Clement Attlee’s government is now remembered as the founder of the welfare state. At every General Election, we are invited to recall the creation of the NHS and the building of a new Jerusalem. Just how radical was this agenda and how much of this memory is myth-making by subsequent Labour governments? Michael Portillo remembers the pragmatism, the compromises and the in-fighting of that post-war government. He meets Denis Healey, Peter Carrington and Tony Benn to uncover the forgotten choices made in a Britain exhausted by one war and on the brink of another.

“Labour local authorities’ increasing fixation with ‘decanting’ their council housing, in combination with their unwillingness to do anything about the rising rents and house prices that first gradually then sharply expelled their core vote has created the utterly bizarre situation of a party that, as Andrew Coley, a housing campaigner in Leeds, puts it, ‘gerrymanders against itself’.”

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“Thatcher used a carrot to encourage the better off tenants to buy their council homes and Cameron is using a stick, his Bedroom Tax, to destroy the remaining tenancies.”

It’s difficult to read the observations of the Guardian commentator I quote below without concluding that nothing has changed. Now it’s worse because then they were planning it but now appear to be implementing it.

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UPDATE: The report has now been released or download it directly here

“The right to housing is not about a roof anywhere, at any cost, without any social ties. It is not about reshuffling people according to a snapshot of the number of bedrooms at a given night. It is about enabling environments for people to maintain their family and community bonds, their local schools, work places and health services allowing them to exercise all other rights, like education, work, food or health.”

This ought to be burned into the front door of the Government department responsible for housing, with a blowtorch, in order to remind them every day as they come to work of their responsibility to all the residents of the United Kingdom.

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In response to:- Do student housing standards need an overhaul? from Building Design online.

A well lit student room – Fitzwilliam Cambridge

In case you haven’t read or are not able to read the article it is an exchange between Michael Chessum President of University of London Union and Dav Bansal Director at Glenn Howells Architects in response to the question in the link above.

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UPDATE: Useful link here -> https://www.le.ac.uk/manufacturingpasts

Conference organised by the Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester
Deadline: 1 February 2013
9-10 July 2013 

Plenary Speakers: John Gold (Oxford Brookes); Frank Mort (Manchester); Guy Ortolano (New York University); Selina Todd (St Hildas, Oxford)

During the second half of the twentieth century the towns and cities of Britain were transformed more extensively than at any period since the industrial revolution.

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The Observer Files This week in 1990

“Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.” Mrs Thatcher’s exit from the political stage was no less heroic, and only slightly less bloody, than the Thane of Cawdor’s execution.  Like some great jungle beast, wounded but still magnificent, she had to be stopped in her tracks before she caused irreparable damage to her party and the country.

Her legacy is bleak.  This is the true measure of the Thatcher decade.  She made the whole world feel that she had halted the historic spiral of British decline, but the facts are there to disprove it.  Our manufacturing base is seriously eroded; inflation, unemployment and interest rates remain high; the balance of payments has rocketed despite the God-given benefits of North Sea oil.  She helped the better off to help themselves while running down the standards of health and education provided for the majority.  She created a social divisiveness that stretched the nation’s fabric to breaking point.  All this has relevance to the debate over the succession, because it highlights the need, not to “build on Thatcherism”, but to break away from its excesses.

Key Quote

“I was shocked.  I was expecting her to look cold and steely but she looked vulnerable and depressed, rather sad.”

An unnamed cabinet minister describes the scene of Thatcher’s resignation..

Larry Elliot wrote an excellent article in the Guardian in 2004 about the effect the Thatcher government had on the economy and I have linked it here:-

Idolatry on the road to perdition

I compiled this list of quotes from Nicky Gavron and others eighteen months ago but with Heygate in flux I think it bears repetition just to remind ourselves that mixed communities are often nothing of the sort and simply an excuse for removing those on the lowest incomes from areas of valuable land.

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UPDATE: 20/2/13 Here’s a better version of the graph -> RICS_graph

This graph is topical at the moment, Social Housing Watch have published a timeline of the history of social housing and although not included, this graph, first published two years ago by RICS, is relevant since it shows the end of local authority council house building in the early 1990s.