Single Aspect Blog

“Not for 70 years, since the Luftwaffe, has there been such a direct threat to the well being of council tenants and their homes”

Right to buy enabled all those council tenants who could afford to, to buy their homes. The most desirable properties went first, the three bedroom houses in the suburbs.  The flats on concrete estates last, if at all.  Some of those who bought their flats on the concrete estates moved out and let their flats, often to DSS unemployed tenants with the rent paid (at that time) directly to the landlord.  This had the effect of reducing the percentage of working people on the estate.  Those working people with what these days are known as aspirations and in those days was called  ambition moved away, either via right to buy as above or simply to better things.

Just to be clear, there were estates with a bad reputation before right to buy. I worked as a council employed carpenter in London for a while in the 1970s and visited estates that were less than glamorous then, so it’s not all Maggie’s fault.

This compounding effect was bad enough then, but has been exacerbated since by the allocations policy that preceded it in the Housing Act of 1977. [Link to Guardian letters – Ed.] This is an area of some concern because the 1977 Act was itself prompted by campaigners following on from the documentary Cathy Come Home first broadcast in 1967.

The results of this may be imagined and on some estates, can be seen. This situation is fast becoming a political football with complete disregard (on the right) for the people left behind.  Having said that, not all estates are the same and there are those that work.  Estates where there are a healthy mixture of people in different situations reflecting wider society and by no means in need of regeneration, the modern word for expelling council tenants and  selling flats to overseas investors.

You might think that the answer to this problem would be obvious.  Build more council houses for (subsidised) rent thus slowly but surely allowing the allocation rules to be relaxed from people in desperate need back to the situation that existed before right to buy when anybody could apply for a council house or flat, including single men, and stand a good chance of getting one.

But no.  What the political right seek instead is the end of council housing as we know it.  They want to rid their immediate neighbourhoods of the “stigma” of council estates and their troubled tenants, and in their place invite owner occupiers.

Not for 70 years, since the Luftwaffe, has there been such a direct threat to the well being of council tenants and their homes.

Let’s give the last word to the woman who has it all at her fingertips, the woman whose grip on the subject in London is unparalleled and who was interviewed by Dave Hill for the Guardian.

Right click link and choose Save Target/Link As

Guardian Karen Buck interview mp3

A worthy champion for the council tenants of the London boroughs.

Postscript from the Guardian

msenthrop

06 Jul 09, 12:04pm (about 10 hours ago)

Here goes Polly: Which party will push for councils to build housing again and put an end to the pernicious evil that was wrought by the “right to buy” policy of the Margaret Thatcher era, branding those who lived in rented housing(in particular council housing) as second class citizens, thereafter known as “social housing”; whereby it becomes necessary to either have a social problem or to cultivate one in order to be allowed to register for it?
Regards

https://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/06/politics-political-parties

UPDATE: https://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2010/sep/21/right-to-buy-coalition-loggerheads

UPDATE: 9/5/11 Michael Collins has a different point of view.  He thinks that Labour caused the problem with the 1977 Housing Act which changed the criteria on which council housing was let, for the worse.  See his recent documentary The Rise and Fall of the Council House

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Housing (Homeless Persons) Act 1977

2.  Priority need  for accommodation.

(1)  For  the  purposes  of  this  Act  a  homeless  person  or  a person  threatened  with  homelessness  has  a  priority  need  for accommodation  when  the  housing  authority  are  satisfied  that he  is within  one of  the  following  categories: —
(a)  he  has  dependent  children  who  are  residing  with  him or-who  might  reasonably  be  expected  to  reside  with him;
(b)  he  is  homeless  or  threatened  with  homelessness  as  a result  of  any  emergency  such  as  flood,  fire  or  any other disaster;
(c)  he  or  any  person  who  resides  or  might  reasonably  be expected  to  reside  with  him  is  vulnerable  as  a  result of  old  age,  mental  illness  or  handicap  or  physical disability  or  other  special  reason.

(2)  For the  purposes of  this Act a homeless person or a person threatened with homelessness who  is  a pregnant woman or resides or  might  reasonably  be  expected  to  reside  with  a  pregnant woman has  a  priority need  for accommodation.

(3)  The  Secretary  of  State  may  by  order,  made  after appropriate  consultations,—
(a)  specify  further  categories  of  persons, as  having a  priority need for  accommodation, and
(b)  amend  or  repeal  any  part of subsection  (1)  or  (2)  above.

(4)  No  order  under  subsection  (3)  above  shall  be made  unless a  draft  of  the  order  has  been  approved  by  resolution  of  each House of  Parliament.

(5)  Any  reference  in  this  Act  to  a  person  having  a  priority need  is  a  reference  to his  having  a  priority need  for accommodation within the meaning of  this  section  or any order  for  the  time being  in  force  under  subsection  (3)  above.

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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

US inspired plan to break up sink estates gets green light

UPDATE: Deborah Orr writing in today’s Guardian, a wonderful piece, beautifully written

The most astounding thing about this mess is that there is still a widespread failure to understand that a flagship ideological experiment in self-regulation by the market is in tatters. The deregulation of banks and building societies, combined with draconian restrictions on the provision of new council housing, which could have replaced stock diminished by the right to buy, was supposed to transform “sink estates” into privately owned and lovingly cared-for communities. Instead, the social demographic of people living in council flats has narrowed massively. The people with the greatest problems are herded together, sometimes seeking a dark kind of identity in their blighted postcode, to the point at which the threat of eviction from council housing is seriously touted as a way of encouraging people to think twice before they take part in riots. God help us.

https://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/31/tory-housing-idea-in-tatters

“Among Tory boroughs across London, there seems now to be a disease spreading ever wider that the land on which council tenants live is available for development”

[Tory struck out 7/11/12 owing to realisation that they’re all at it. Hello Southwark (Lab)! – Ed.]

On [Thursday] July 9th 2009 Paul Waugh of the London Evening Standard published an article on the planned demolition of all the council estates in Hammersmith and Fulham. I read this while returning home having been to a political meeting at the Methodist Hall in Westminster, and on arriving home got straight on the computer to find out more about it. I quickly discovered that there was already a blog for Queen Caroline and later on found out about the Ferrier Estate in Kidbrooke and Greenwich.

Later on in the year I subscribed to Roof magazine (now sadly no longer with us – April 2012) from Shelter, found myself speaking to Andy Slaughter on the telephone for 15 minutes about H&F and have subsequently continued to take a keen interest in council housing matters and the Tory intention to end it.

I have a personal interest in council housing because from 10/78 to 10/80 I lived at 93 Aragon Tower on the Pepys Estate (via the GLC hard-to-let scheme) which  “was sold by Lewisham Council to Berkeley Group, in 2002 for £11.5m” (£80k per flat), to fund a leisure centre in the borough for £7 million and provide some money for regeneration of the remaining estate. This was their best block, the jewel in the crown, and they displaced 144 families to do so. To me this was the start of the rot, although there may have been other examples I simply don’t know. The estate featured in a documentary called The Tower.

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I was at Progressive London 2010 on Saturday.  Got there just after the start at 10am it was bustling in the main foyer.  Being a Dave Hill follower I was keen to see the man in person and  having made it to the back of a crowded and stuffy room on the 2nd floor, standing room only, he was next to speak.  He said that Boris was a milder and more gentle version of what might have been expected, less contentious and more redistributive, that he had increased free access to travel for some groups unexpectedly.

He said that Boris was difficult to get hold of to answer difficult questions, that Ken used to let the Mayor’s question time run on until everybody had had their say but Boris just cut it off when time was up.  He said that it is possible to get answers out of Boris but that you have to follow him around London to his numerous “openings” and tackle him on the spot.  He added that Boris produced a large amount of written answers to questions to such an extent that Dave was encouraging bloggers to go through it all and saying that more bloggers were needed since stories often arose from their writings.  By the time Dave had finished speaking the room was even more crowded and stuffy so I left to get some air.

Downstairs in the foyer I met one of the HandsoffQC people and had a coffee and a chat about the goings on in Hammersmith and Fulham.

Back in Invision Suite 4 with the windows open it was time for the Housing session, less crowded than the earlier Boris do but slowly filled up.  Megan Dobney kicked off, Dave Hill turned up this time as an audience member, with his familiar long grey coat and notebook in hand.  Nicky Gavron had a lot to say about the London Plan which she had worked on with Ken back in the day, but more to say about the dismantling of it going on with the Boris version called the draft London Plan which was abandoning the aims of the Labour version by taking a borough by borough approach and reducing almost to zero those targets for affordable homes in Conservative boroughs while increasing those in Labour ones.  It would seem that under Ken the London plan took a city wide approach to affordable housing.

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First seen in the Salisbury Review

Psychologists blame parents for their children’s problems but overlook an even stronger influence — the design of the home. The mid-19th century crime peak arose from tenement buildings, a steady fall of crime to a record low accompanied the great spread of late Victorian single-family houses. Yet the 20th century reverted to tenements in unprecedented numbers and crime has soared in parallel as well as becoming vastly more vicious.

The leader of the new tenement psychology was Le Corbusier, whose 1923 book, Vers Une Architecture, introduced the Modern Movement. He argued that throwing people together in blocks of flats would create communities — an idea which won global support. Its validity went unchecked and Labour’s 1948 planning control facilitated its enforcement, as the popular semi‑detached house was dismissed as out-dated and up to 90,000 Victorian houses were demolished annually for comprehensive redevelopment with flats.

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A pleasant afternoon spent walking around an estate in North West London with the C20th Society, not far from the RAF Museum and the Met Police training centre.  An estate due to be largely (75%) demolished and rebuilt owing to problems of anti social behaviour.

We were shown the plans on an exhibition board in the library foyer.

Photos on Flickr

https://www.flickr.com/photos/singleaspect/sets/72157627588975782/

Plans here

https://www.barnet.gov.uk/regeneration-grahame-park

 

UPDATE: Bi-monthly meetings -> Purfleet on Thames Community Forum

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Whilst looking for a cheap ex local authority flat to buy in or near London I came across the Garrison Estate at Purfleet and went down to have a look one sunny Saturday.

Click for larger image

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AS: Society at the moment asks architects to build these new homes for them but I

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mean this may be really stupid we may have to rethink the whole thing it may

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be that we should only be asked to to repair the roofs and add the odd

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bathroom to the old industrial houses and just leave people where they are to

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smash it up in complete abandon and happiness so that nobody has to worry

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about it anymore

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PS: We still feel under an obligation to give the absolutely that the to provide

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the best possible quality irrespective of what people expect and what treatment

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it it’s going to get.

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Narrator: Yet another building site in the East End of London. An East End rebuilt almost

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out of recognition to those who knew it before the war but this site is

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different there are no tower blocks for one thing. It’s by allison and peter

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smithson virtually the only british architects to have an international

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reputation and whose influence on architecture since the war’s been out

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of all proportion to the relatively small amount of their work to be built.

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their school at Hunstanton Norfolk and the economist office building in St

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James’s London embodied significant innovations but their chief interest

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is housing and they’ve done much important theoretical work on it. This

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site at Poplar however represents the first opportunity they’ve had to put

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their ideas on housing into practice and inevitably perhaps it’s very far from

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being just another lot of council flats.

PS: We regard it as a demonstration of a more

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enjoyable way of living in an old industrial part of a city it is a model

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an examplar of a new mode of urban organization and we think we have here a

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site big enough so that when it’s finished you’ll be able to smell feel

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and experience the new life that’s being offered through your full range of

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senses.

AS: A general objective when we get a new site is to knit together what is

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good in the surroundings by the insertion of a new building to inject

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thereby new life even to buildings and things that are old and tired. Right from

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the start we began to identify with a site to put down mental roots hooking

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onto rosebay willowherb, the children overturning wrecked cars, the smell of

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curry on the stairs, rejected tenements, oddments of past character or obvious

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large identifying fixes of the district or the city or even the region in our

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case, the big power stations. In the late forties and early fifties when we first

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started thinking about housing the lack of identity and the lack of a pattern,

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any pattern of association we used to talk of objects as found, that is

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anything and everything can be raised by association to become the portrait of

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the ordinary and in this way an industrial site is very easy to identify

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with compared with a semi detached housing estate a site on an industrial

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blight or ones industrial heritage depends how you look at it can very

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easily be used to renew a district to re-identify and become a real piece

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of urban renewal. This is something to do with urban scale and that industrial

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sites are somehow forthright and honest. This may be a personal thing as coming

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from the Northeast we see the ships as connectors of people to their district

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and to the world outside. On this side the ships can be a decoration to the

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urban scene – the ships on the Thames approach the Isle of Dogs turn at right

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angles and go past. The river is the biggest fix of all a big geographical

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fix there are also two historical fixes which affect our site. The East India

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dock of 1806 and the 1844 railway.

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AS: When we started work three and a half years ago and you could still walk up to

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the fifth floor the now-demolished tenements you could look over the

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upcoming roar the tunnel traffic into the East India dock. Calm sheet of water a

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few ships. Now when we’ve reached the fifth floor level again it’s being

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filled and when you should be able to see it from the houses you won’t be able

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to. We’ll be left with a handful of China shards on the site maybe ballast from

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the East Indiaman, maybe cargo fallout used locally

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This is not to say we relied on the East India dock or any other fix for

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support.

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We realize you’re in a situation of flux and change. The life has gone from the

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two historical fixes on site and the ships on the terms are literally passing

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either down to TIbury if the container port opens or to Antwerp and

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Delta port if it doesn’t. We realize you have to be strong enough to be

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self-supporting. Big enough to be self-supporting, that you have to carry

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the full responsibility for renewal of your part of the district and ultimately

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of the city

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PS: The site is bounded on three sides by very heavy traffic on the left the

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northern approach to the Blackwall tunnel at the bottom the east in your

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dock road which shared you to grow from a four-lane to a six-lane highway and on

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the right by Cotton street the main feeder road to the Isle of Dogs.

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We’ve tried to overcome the problems of this high level of traffic noise in a

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number of ways. At the edge of the back line of payment as near as we can get

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the source of noise we put an acoustic wall which is higher than motorcars

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which throws the noise back towards the road instead of allowing it to pass

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through towards the building. But to stop it looking like a prison, the wall panels

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have angle gaps between them – so if you walk along you can seek keep seeing

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through but there is no direct path for sound to pass through. Inside this a line of

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trees helps to break up the sound of traffic, and the building’s themselves

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have been deliberately organized to create an area in the center of the site

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protected from noise. A stress-free zone. The buildings are not organized like

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filing cabinets one after the other.

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The site has been split like a kipper with the same functions on the inside in

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each building on the outside we put the noisy next to the noisy that is the

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walkways or decks and the living rooms – but the living room themselves are

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protected by these vertical pieces which stop noise traveling across the face of

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the building and by designing the windows so that they can check in a

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position that admits air at the top but present prevents the entry of direct

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noise at the bottom. With these various devices we can get the noise level in

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the living rooms down to a reasonable level. On the inside away and protected

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from noise we place the bedrooms and the kitchen. The kitchens are so planned that a

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mother can keep an eye on a two to three year old child playing out on the access

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deck on one side and also from time to time

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look down on the other side into the into these play spaces which are

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intended for the somewhat older children. In the middle of the stress free zone

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the ground is modeled upwards to discourage people from playing football

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and so making excessive noise though provision for

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football is made elsewhere on the site. The mound doesn’t look very large on the

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model but it is in fact two stories high and it will be surprising eminence

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within the flat landscape of the site. There is already in London one place

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that has a central stress-free zone and that is Gray’s Inn. Gray’s Inn is still an

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extraordinarily civilized place. It has become more livable as traffic has got

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worse by contrast to the areas surrounding it.

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Its little pool of calm in central London is one of the real discoveries

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almost of the last 10 years. The idea that one could having rooms,

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chambers there looking out onto this quiet central tree-filled area is marvellous.

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AS: London has these simple good spaces but above this scale there’s virtually nothing.

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London really has never faced up to being more than a collection of villages.

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PS: No, the idea that you could have a collection, a scatter of events

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as a city it is quite acceptable to us providing of course that the

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communication systems work well. But, when the city becomes big when the city

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becomes an urban region the scale of the parts, the scale of these events that the

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pieces of the scatter, the scale of them’s got to be increased so that it

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matches the scale of the urban region and that the scale of the communication

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systems the scale of its leisure areas the scale of the zones of operation of

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the city all about to get bigger and more obviously structured and inter

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related to one another

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Structured and interrelated so that they can be read as easily by ordinary people

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as we hope our building will be read. This site is just big enough for us

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to say and for people to read a whole sentence in the language of architecture.

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The language of architecture is something that can both explain and

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enhance the use of a building.

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Thus in an old building you recognize where the door is because it

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is identified by portico. In a new building we have to produce equivalent

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symbols which indicate where you’re supposed to walk in, where you drive, where you bring

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the dust cart and so on.

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On this site we’ve cut moats in the ground on the traffic side of the buildings and

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there all vehicular movement and garaging take place. So coming to the

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building as a walker from a bus stop

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you never come into contact with vehicles and conversely the driver of the

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dust card has no fear of knocking down an old lady.

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Similarly the building’s themselves explain how they are intended to be used.

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These long horizontal recesses can only be decks for walking along, and the entry

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points to them by way of lifts and stairs the vertical movements are clearly

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indicated by the change of scale and volume. On the decks there are what we

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call “eddy places” outside the front doors where the dwelling takes a piece

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of the deck for itself so your doormat is not kicked aside by the passers by

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and you can put out a few pots of plants or leave parcels. This “eddy places” is out of

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the general flow of movement along the deck. The deck itself is wide enough for the

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milkman to bring his cart along, or for two women with prams to stop for a talk and

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still let the postman by, and the building also explains its use in that

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wherever you need to take hold of something or move around some woodwork

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of concrete element then there’s a smooth rounded corner. Its form will

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respond we hope to the way people want to live now with their equipment, their

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domestic appliances, and their cars. In a way it would be like the first Georgian

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Square in london it will be to outsiders something that they can, they can

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immediately see is a new form and to the people who live in it it’s it offers a

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a place with a special character that in which will release them and change them

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and be capable of being lived in generation after generation. At the turn

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of the century architects dreamed of garden cities and in every town and village in

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England we see council houses built, built, and building right up till

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today which are the children of the garden city idea – and in the twenties in

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the heroic period of modern architecture the models, the prototypes, developed on

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the continent for a simple clean sun giving architecture are now being built

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in England in the Sixties. What we have now is people living in these clean

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sun-drenched boxes with fitted carpets inside and vandalism outside.

AS: The

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realities of our working life are going to be traffic, noise, air pollution,

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vandalism, lack of quality.

PS: And the theory developed in the twenties and thirties

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the simple architecture in which there will be few cars. This, this dream this

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model has been overrun. Overrun by the glut of the supermarts and the glut

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on the roads.

AS: The accuracy of the brief given to architects makes for the reality. It

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aids the architect’s accuracy in pinpointing the dream.

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The brief given to our outside architects by the Greater London Council

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is continually being revised by feedback from tenants and from their own

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maintenance people. The GLC are probably the world’s best briefers of Architects

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in this sense certainly I, I’ve never heard of any better. But although this is

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done very responsibly the building of this mutated dream by all the people

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concerned, it seems that the GLC really got very small thanks from Society for

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this because when we take foreign visiting architect around these sites

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they’re literally horrified at the amount of vandalism we see.

PS: But

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funnily enough that doesn’t seem to change one’s own attitudes towards

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building. That is that we we still feel under an obligation to give the absolutely

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that the – to provide the best possible quality irrespective of what people

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expect and what treatment it it’s going to get,

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nevertheless it’s very depressing for the contractors and the buil, the

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builders, the contractors, the subcontractors and the architect to feel

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that all the effort they’re putting in is going to be – much of the effort that

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that they put in is going to be smashed up.

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AS: I mean society at the moment asks architect to build these new homes for

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them but I mean this may be really stupid we may have to rethink the whole

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thing it may be that we should only be asked to to repair the roofs and add the

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odd bathroom to the old industrial houses and just leave people where they

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are to smash it up in complete abandon and happiness so that nobody has to worry

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about it anymore. You know we may be asking people to live in a way that that

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is stupid. They may be just want to you know be left alone.

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PS: One of the men are inside said that this

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what we were trying to do with too good for the people that were going to live

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in it and we find this a unacceptable but to say that it’s too good but one

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wonders why that’s what why one feels like that and I suspect that it’s partly

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historical, that is that architects have always felt the need to build not for

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the occupying generation but for, to sort of body out the ideals of their period in a

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way that they could be felt by the by generations that follow. In the East

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London there are five or six very famous churches. One of them is close to this

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site St Annes Limehouse by Nicholas Hawksmoor. Now Hawksmoor couldn’t have

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cared I suspect why he was asked to build these churches. They were built

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buy having a coal tax with which the program for building them

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was abandoned halfway through

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in fact the things that happened him, the way the money was raised very similar to

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the situation now, but he built in the best possible way and the building has

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lived on through 10 or 15 generations into the present carrying the kind of ethos

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of the early 17th century to us now and we feel in the same way an

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obligation which is outside of the present financial or economic situation

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to build for successive occupying generations.

AS: Unless a building outlasts

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its first users we get no body of choice that is there’s no pool of housing from

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which people can choose how to live, where they want to live

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and more important you get no buildup of a comparable body of quality. This was

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the situation we stepped into after the war completely vandalised environment of

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anything will do, make do, you know there were no possible standards because

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there was nothing – nothing decent to compare things to. Therefore maintenance

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of quality objects is a real cultural necessity. Londoners are not particularly

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good at this I don’t think they really know about it, that is if culture of cities was a

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criteria for joining the common market, any African state would have as good a

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chance as Londoners have.

PS: If we’re not to be torn apart by our differing

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individual natures as makers and destroyers society has to to to to make

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a framework so that the that the the makers can get ahead of the destroyers.

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AS: Although it’s not the architects business to talk about, think about up mechanisms

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for changing the responsibility for housing in order to combat vandalism it

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is our duty to speak about it in order to safeguard the architects dream of what

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housing could be like and there are obviously understood ways, such as giving

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a tenant full responsibility for keeping the house and the outside the

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door step and the grounds in perfect condition to hand onto the next

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generation who after all are an extension of ourselves they’re not some

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nebulous character

PS: At the moment there is a terrific lack of fit between those

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things which people own, the way people treat things they own and the, the way

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they think about and treat what is in the public

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area of ownership.

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This is reflected terribly obviously in the, when you go to any, any dwelling

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any house in any part of the country the inside is almost always well-kept well

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furnished, clean. The outside, particularly in state housing. Broken lifts, smashed-up

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glass in entrance halls, all the things we all know, know about. The architect is in

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a strange situation, but he can recognize that the peoples aspirations about how

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they wish to behave.

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That’s a funny way of putting it, are

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changing that is in spite of the vandalism, that people are learning to

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expect a style of life which has more quality, and in a sense more control

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and this is most clearly seen in the leisure pattern.

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Ironically enough an opportunity to extend this leisure pattern on a huge

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scale is being missed not far from our site.

AS: The scale of the London Docks is the

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sort of scale we’re talking about this is an area equal to medieval London and

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yet it’s a tiny area scene in the whole greater london in region. A few water

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parks at that scale not needing grass-cutting no trouble with

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footballers wearing the surface off. This water as leisure pleasure structured

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housing groups is the european fashion at the moment. For Tower Hamlets such a fashion

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is an economic bonanza like having an oil well in the back garden, or backyard

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in their case. France has a regional plan

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which is Rousillon to Languedoc virtually Marseille to the Spanish border

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of water pleasure structured towns. As well as this there’s development all

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along the coast, and architects Spoerry has built his dream of what housing could be

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like in relation to water using for this town traditional provincaI materials

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and the peasant language of architecture, but his dream was of a pedestrian town

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and the house owners in Port Grimaud take the cars into load/unload but take them

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outside to park. Therefore this town is a pleasure to use, it works it’s a real

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economic success the sort of place you can take your children to to the beach

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and they can go get an ice cream and you just don’t have to worry about it – and it

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only started in June 1966. We, we could allow ourselves such

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pleasures in London we needn’t be so puritanical about the fact that

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the dock water is right next the River Thames and so near the Lea Valley leisure

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pleasure grounds. Venice sinks in the mud, they’ll be round collecting to save it.

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Prop it up. We could have a a new Venice in London. It’s virtually the same size if

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you take from St Katharine’s dock by the tower to East India Dock which is by

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our site.

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The people who will live in Robin Hood gardens will use this way out of London

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in their cars. They’re the privileged few in our society they enjoy the welfare

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state they don’t have heavy taxes to give them angst and it’s not for them to

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worry about the quality of the motorway, the fact that the fences are inconsistent the

26:20

lampposts are ugly or there are too many signs the bypassed and the bypasses are

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unprotected, the generation younger than ours extremely depressed about the lack

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of quality in the road program, considering so

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many roads are being built in Germany and in America. It’s as if we were a country of

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ostriches but our attitude to motorways, ring ways is at last, a chance of a great reversal.

PS: A chance

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at last to get all traffic out of domestic environments. We are longing for

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the day in which the motorway pattern and the mass transit system lines can settle

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down so that we can get on with the job of rebuilding a quiet more humane living

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environment.