Single Aspect Blog

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We need a type of housing that can be built en masse without scaring the locals, which will blend into town or village be it private or council housing and solve the housing shortage. I know, let’s call it the terrace. Each one will have a front and back garden, three bedrooms and a loft for storage space not an unnecessary fourth bedroom. A downstairs toilet, one bathroom not two and adequate storage space for a family.

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“Ever more sophisticated CCTV policing the fortresses of the rich and the desolate housing estates of the disadvantaged has become the iconic social intervention of the age.”

This phrase jumped out at me today while reading the Observer and Will Hutton’s long and accurate portrayal of broken Britain and the reasons why https://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/26/them-and-us-will-hutton

Within this blog I have written about housing estates with obtrusive  CCTV  – Maiden Lane for a start – and mentioned gated communities but it wasn’t until I read Will Hutton’s article that I saw how these two were related and in the worst possible way, both symptoms of a widely separated and decaying society ill at ease with itself.

This is clearly part of the problem that regenerating the Modernist estates is only going to partly solve.  So long as the disparities of wealth and shortage of subsidised housing persist then so will the cameras.  They are not here to stay.  Unlike others I do believe there will come a time when we as a society will be able to do away with the “surveillance state”.  But that time is not yet, not even close.

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UPDATE: 10/1/2013 I’m a big fan of the tunnel, I think it needs to be built but I won’t be following the details week by week, for that see the links below.

For anyone with a keen interest in London and its infrastructure, and in engineering and industrial archaeology as I have, the advent of the Thames Tideway Tunnel is a matter of great interest.

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My thinking on this has been coloured by the analysis of Nicky Gavron.  For example if I skim my blog I can find the following quotation . . .

‘Mixed and balanced communities are rightly one of the shibboleths of the London Plan. But under Mr Johnson’s this means ‘a mix of tenure should be sought, particularly in neighbourhoods where social renting predominates’. Where, one might ask, are displaced residents to go? Crucially, there is no reciprocal policy for social rented housing to be introduced into areas where private housing predominates.

On the one hand the right wing London boroughs want to clear their council estates and build private flats for sale to overseas investors and on the other hand they don’t want new “social” tenants moving in anywhere, the polarisation of London will continue.

Now turning for a moment to the interview Dave Hill conducted with Karen Buck MP we can find the following transcript:-

DH: In terms of security of tenure isn’t there an ongoing debate in the world of housing assocations social housing in the broader sense about whether you need to change the rules I mean it’s because you have situations where people they get themselves into a nice social rented home of one type or another they stay there for ever sometimes they start to earn a lot more money than they earned when they moved into it.  It’s that kind of conversation that’s going on.  Is there no kind of argument for changing the rules as they stand at the moment?

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In addition to the meeting itself there was a bonus in the foyer of the theatre in the form of a full sized ground floor plan of a 2 bed 4 person house complete with sufficient furniture to make it realistic.  This means nothing without photographs and so with the kind assistance of the staff at CABE I am able to show you the following which measures 8m x 4m:-

Click image above for larger version

Space to live
This floor plan is a full-size 1:1 scale image of the ground floor of a typical new-build two bedroom family house. Imagine two adults, a child and a baby living here. Is there space to play, or store the toys? Is there room to share a meal with your in-laws? Where do you store an ironing board, a vacuum cleaner, a mop and bucket? Where do you hang your coats? What about the dog basket? Visit space-standards-floor-plan for the article.

In terms of the layout in the theatre, the main entrance would be above the photo and the auditorium, below.  The remaining photos show the scene as laid out for an exhibition elsewhere.

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Last night I attended an event at the Broadway Theatre Barking [Delivering more quality affordable housing – have your say] which was a meet the people event to discuss affordable housing in Greater London.  It was well attended.

The panel from left to right (from the audience) were as follows:-

• David Montague – Group Chief Executive L & Q Group
• Rachael Orr – Shelter London Campaigns Manager
• Boris Johnson – Mayor of London
• Baroness Neuberger DBE – Chair
• Richard Blakeway – Mayor’s Advisor for Housing
• Cllr Phil Waker – Cabinet Member for Housing, London Borough of Barking & Dagenham

The evening began with a short speech from each of the panellists, excluding the chair, each explaining their role in the process of planning housing in London although as he himself admitted, Richard Blakeway’s contribution was fairly brief being much the same as that of Boris Johnson’s who preceded him.

When Phil Waker spoke I was taken straight back to the London Festival of Architecture meeting because just like Dick Mortimer of Family Mosaic then, I felt Phil Waker was speaking from the heart and from direct experience rather than a wish list and by the end of the evening, he had, for me, come over as by far the most powerful voice on the panel.

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Mayor of London Boris Johnson will be at the Broadway Theatre in Barking on Tuesday, September 21 at 7pm, with a panel of experts, to take your questions. The public debate will be chaired by Baroness Neuberger DBE, chairman of the One Housing Group. Panel members are Richard Blakeway, the mayor’s Housing adviser; Rachael Orr, Shelter London campaigns manager; Cllr Phil Waker, cabinet member for housing on Barking and Dagenham Council and David Montague, group chief executive of L and Q Group.

Call 0208 507 5607 for a free ticket.

From London Open House 2010

The Progress Estate, now a conservation area, was built during the time of the popularity of garden cities in England. Specifically built to house munition workers at Woolwich Arsenal, Frank Baines was lead architect. Almost every type of cottage architecture is represented with the houses mainly in terraces of four or six houses with gardens.

Photos at https://www.flickr.com/photos/singleaspect/sets/72157627528201719/

In the week before this year’s Open House weekend I toured London at some pace with the 2010 brochure in my bag,  and this was one of the visits I made – Stonebridge Estate and Fawood Childrens’ Centre.

Stonebridge Hillside Hub

Photos from September 2010

https://www.flickr.com/photos/singleaspect/sets/72157627521049825/

Story of estate leading up to the regeneration

https://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/dec/15/gang-wars-police-supergrass-help

https://www.building.co.uk/sectors/housing/hackney-sur-mer-levitt-bernstein%E2%80%99s-queensbridge-quarter/3147407.article

Holly Street and others, discussed.

https://www.singleaspect.org.uk/pdf/holly/hmr01.pdf

Two films about the estates linked here:-

A tower block is a terrace stood on end – I’ve paraphrased that from a commentator in The Occupation who says that “just lay a tower block on its side” but you’ve still got the same problems same poor health services and lack of work.

Holly Street before and after is featured in both films linked here:-

The Occupation
https://vimeo.com/61824362

The London Particular
https://vimeo.com/61727960

Holly Street is one of the largest housing regeneration projects of its kind in the world.  It  took  shape  in  1991,  in  a  proposal  to  demolish  one  of  Hackney’s  most notorious 1960’s system-built housing estates. The area has now become a mixed-tenure  residential  neighbourhood  of  streets  and  squares,  containing  a  mixture  of mainstream  housing  for  sale,  in  shared-equity  ownership,  self-build  housing  and housing association rented homes.

The tenants of the old estate were involved in the design of  the new neighbourhood  from  its  inception. Having appreciated all  too well that  architecture  can  discriminate  or  stigmatise  by  its  appearance  and  imagery  as well as  in  its  layout and detailed design, most wanted  to  live  in ordinary houses on an  ordinary  street,  in  a  neighbourhood  that would  not  be  perceived  by  others  as either municipal or obviously experimental.

Many of the tenants had moved onto the estate with young  families  in  the 1960’s and then  ‘aged  in place’, and  the area had an unusually high concentration of older  residents who had survived  the decline of the area into a ‘sink estate’. The intention was that these could form the nucleus of a more stable and buoyant local community, if only they could be persuaded to stay.

Great stuff here

https://lovelondoncouncilhousing.blogspot.com/2010_11_01_archive.html

The Blairs take on it here:-

The dirty, troubled towerblocks of the Holly Street estate, barely a hundred metres away, served as a constant reminder of the shortcomings of postwar social democracy. “I remember how Holly Street represented everything to me we needed to change in inner-city life,” Blair said on a visit to the estate in 1998, as most of its buildings were being demolished. “I remember going canvassing … and the tremendous fear people had of living on the estate … You had to speak to them through their letter boxes.”

https://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2004/dec/09/property.britishidentity

No matter what my personal opinion on the success of rehousing people from the slums, I cannot argue with the facts and Blair’s experience outlined above in that Guardian article must have been representative of the kind of problems that triggered the Comprehensive Estates Initiative.

It is a matter of fact that I changed front doors on the Trowbridge Estate in 1977 – while working as a carpenter for the then GLC – owing to break-ins, so clearly life in those tower blocks wasn’t all rosy either.  On reflection it would appear that the 1970s were the last trouble free decade of life on concrete estates and even then it was brewing.  Both myself and some friends of the time obtained the keys to council flats in London in the second half of that decade under the GLC Hard to let scheme.

You have to ask yourself why they were hard to let don’t you?

Follow up . . .

Of course government policy would see this as a move in the right direction towards a social and tenure mix and a more balanced community. It probably does not feel like this if you are on the waiting list – mixed communities don’t seem to work in the opposite direction, as the recent nasty little episode about ‘million pound Council houses’ illustrated.

https://www.jonestheplanner.co.uk/2012/11/hackney-hipsters.html