Adam Voelcker, Sidney Colwyn Foulkes: The Architecture of a Reluctant Modernist (University of Wales Press, 2025)
I’m not going to write much today as the real knowledge and expertise here lies with Adam Voelcker, an architect in Wales who has combined a career in private practice with writing on architecture – a cv that fits him perfectly to write a newly published book on the life and work of Sidney Colwyn Foulkes.
Foulkes (1884-1971) is an architect who deserves to be much better known. To quote from the publisher’s description, he was:
one of Britain’s most significant regional architects. His design work included schools, shops, churches and church halls, town halls, hospitals, cinemas, private houses and public housing schemes. Foulkes made a major contribution to buildings in his hometown of Colwyn Bay and its surrounds, and his influence extended across Wales and beyond.
Sidney Colwyn Foulkes
Foulkes’ biography is worthy of study in its own right – the son of a bankrupted Colwyn Bay builder, his family’s sole breadwinner at the tender age of 16. His ‘first real break’, according to an online account, came in 1900 in the design and construction of ‘a demountable pierrot stand’. A steady stream of work thereafter secured him by 1914 the status and financial standing to secure a place at the School of Architecture of the University of Liverpool with a scholarship granted by its director Charles Herbert Reilly. (1)
Having qualified, Foulkes established his architectural practice in North Wales and took on the wide variety of commissions such local prominence brought – ranging from commercial premises to public works such as schools and hospitals. His Palace Cinema in Conwy won the prestigious Cinema of the Year award in 1936.
Foulkes did not design any council housing until, aged 60, in 1945. But the schemes that followed are, in my view, some of the most attractive in Britain. With housing a top priority as the country began to recover from the ravages of war, Foulkes was commissioned to design two new estates, one at Llanrwst and another in Beaumaris – both, as was typical in Wales, on difficult sloping sites. According to Voelcker, Foulkes professed himself terrified by the steep hillside setting of what became the Cae Bricks estate in Beaumaris.
Adam Voelcker, ‘A Council-House Architecture’, Touchstone, 2023, pp 30-35
Voelcker’s article in Touchstone, the annual journal of the Royal Society of Architects in Wales, provides an excellent account of the design and evolution of the Llanwrst estate – a fine summary of both the principles and exacting standards that Foulkes brought to his work and the constraints and pressures common to all architectural projects but perhaps particularly so to public housing. It’s a rare forensic account of the interaction between architect, local authority, national legislation and policy, and finance. You can read the article, ‘A Council-House Architecture’, here at the link provided (pdf).
The Cae Bricks Estate, captioned ‘Terrace on a Hillside’, in the 1949 Housing Manual
Cae Bricks was largely complete by 1948 (later extensions were built in the early 1950s) and the estate featured in the Ministry of Health and Housing’s 1949 Housing Manual as an example of good practice of building in terraces. Foulkes favoured terraced housing as more economical but it was also better adapted to Welsh terrain than more conventional semi-detached housing. Foulkes provided the homes wider frontages (allowing a front parlour) and lesser depth, features that maximised light and ventilation in the homes.
Aneurin Bevan, visiting the estate under construction, noted the below-regulation, 7 feet 6 inches (2.3 metre) ceiling heights – saving on bricks and heating costs – but was reassured by the quality of Foulkes’ designs. The height became the national standard in 1952.
Foulkes received another major council housing commission from Colwyn Bay Borough Council, the design of the Elwy Road Estate in Rhos-on-Sea, a scheme of 148 houses and 90 flats. It was built in two phases between 1952 and 1961 though its planning appears to have begun much earlier. Elwy Road is located on a more gently sloping site but is notable for its Radburn-style design separating cars and pedestrians – perhaps influenced by the pioneering Queen’s Park South Estate in nearby Wrexham, dating from 1950 – and the decorative touches that Foulkes brought to it. (2)
The Radburn influence is seen best in the two long terraces, one pastel-shaded, the other brown-rendered, and their rear service roads. Variety was provided by off-set, end of terrace brick houses and the three-storey blocks of flats. If you look beyond the open airy feel of the estate and its distant sea views, you’ll notice picturesque detail in the Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear-themed sculptural pediments provided, commissioned by Foulkes, with a little money to spare it is said, from his friend George Thomas Capstick.
Frank Lloyd Wright, of Welsh extraction and in North Wales to receive an honorary degree from the University of Bangor, visited Elwy Road and declared it ‘perfectly charming’. The Ministry of Housing and Local Government later recognised it as of ‘outstanding quality’.
Other significant public housing commissions in Pentre Maelor (near Wrexham), Abergele and Neston (on the Wirral) are also fully detailed in Voelcker’s book. All bear his hallmark. As Voelcker’s chapter on housing concludes:
[Foulkes] had spent years struggling with changing space standards and budgetary constraints imposed by successive governments. With his determination to provide the housewife and her family with a satisfactory dwelling, he finally arrived at his wide double-fronted parlour house and was not going to lose it.
His housing designs perhaps illustrate what Voelcker describes as the blend of tradition and innovation that characterises Foulkes’ work. Many of his designs were broadly historicist but some – his cinemas notably and, unobtrusively, the housing estates are modernist in style. He was perhaps, as Voelcker terms him, a ‘reluctant modernist’.
Voelcker’s books charts this fertile and accomplished career in richly illustrated detail. He considers Foulkes’ finest achievements to be his post-war estates and his designs in the developing field of industrial landscaping. His work for a number of public bodies was recognised in his being made a Fellow of the Institute of Landscape Architecture; his contribution as landscape consultant for the extension of the Dolgarrog power station won a Civil Trust Award in 1959.
It’s good to see this life and work fully recognised. As Voelcker states:
The book traces how, far removed from the metropolis like so many regional architects, Foulkes had to fight to produce good, ordinary architecture at a time of intense cultural and political change to define an architecture for the modern age.
Adam Voelcker, Sidney Colwyn Foulkes: The Architecture of a Reluctant Modernist (November 2025),160pp, 16 colour and 49 black and white illustrations, is published by the University of Wales Press.
Ned Newitt, Housing the People of Leicester: a History of Social Housing (Leicester Pioneer Press, 2025)
When I started this blog almost twelve years ago, council housing was a strangely neglected and too often stigmatised topic both in terms of academic study and popular discourse. And you can see from that first sentence just how easy it is to slip into distancing language. The point is, of course, that almost one third of households lived in council homes at peak in 1980; if you are a member of the early post-war generation, there’s a one in two chance that you spent part of your life in council housing. So, it’s our history and it deserves to be told well and respectfully.
I’m glad to say that much has changed since then. I’d like to think the blog (and a couple of books) played a small part in that but beyond that, in a time of housing crisis, many more people have come to realise just how vital social housing is – not only in providing accommodation to those in greatest need (which has become its reduced role) but in ensuring a housing market that works for private renters and would-be owner occupiers too. The centenary of the 1919 Housing Act – breakthrough legislation in terms of the requirement to build and build well and financial support to do so – provided a good opportunity for councils, tenants’ organisation and others to celebrate the story of their homes and estates.
Anyway, after that slightly self-serving introduction, the point of this post is to strongly recommend the new book written by Ned Newitt, Housing the People of Leicester: A History of Social Housing.
Homes built under the 1919 Housing Act: Nos 13-15 Deepdale, Coleman Road Estate, designed by Pick, Everard and Keay (Photo credit: Ned Newitt, 1992)
The first thing to say is that it’s hard to think of a person better qualified to write the book. Ned was a Leicester city councillor from 1984 to 2003, when he served amongst other things as chair of the Housing Committee. He is also a prolific chronicler of Leicester’s radical history with an active blog and many publications to his name.
As its opening words proclaim, the book:
celebrates the efforts and achievements of Leicester’s municipal housing pioneers. 100 years ago, they believed without good-quality housing, people’s life chances were dramatically reduced.
Whilst that truism sometimes seems forgotten today, it captures well the imperative then and now to provide everyone with a decent home and the benefit of that not only to the individual but to wider society.
But his succeeding words provide a dose of realism: ‘Unfortunately providing public housing was never going to be straightforward. From the outset it was beset by competing political agenda …’. And beyond those political conflicts, there were the good intentions gone awry – ambitious experiments that failed and changing circumstance that undermined founding ideals. It is a quality of the book that it charts this complex terrain thoroughly and judiciously.
The account begins – as does the wider history of council housing – in the slum conditions that blighted rapidly industrialising and urbanising Britain in the nineteenth century and the consequent need to provide the decent, affordable housing for working people that the private sector wouldn’t. Leicester’s first council housing was built in Winifred Street in 1900 (the tenements remain, converted into flats for elderly people in the 1960s). A local councillor and architect, John Tudor Walters, was a driving force behind the scheme.
The book describes many other individuals – for example, Labour councillors Herbert Hallam and Harry Hand in the early years – whose energy and ideals were crucial in getting housing built. Later, JS Fyfe, Leicester’s Housing Architect from 1920 to 1952, is prominent. The book does an excellent job in recounting the personalities that influenced the city’s housing policies and reminds us that, here as elsewhere, the drive and ideas of individuals shaped our council housing alongside national dynamics and legislation.
Nevertheless, it was the latter in our highly centralised state that were generally dominant, never more so than after the First World War when council housing in Leicester and the wider nation was shaped by the famous report on postwar housing by Tudor Walters, now a Liberal MP, and the 1919 Housing Act mentioned earlier.
This plan captures well the ideal of the post-First World War Garden Suburb: the layout of the Park Estate (Saffron Lane). (Image credit: Leicester City Council)
The ‘competing political agenda’ Newitt alluded to are never better illustrated by the back and forth of housing policy that he charts in the interwar period. Early idealism and generous investment were seen in Leicester’s first postwar estate, the Park (or Saffron Lane) Estate and, one of the city’s showpieces, the South Braunstone Estate.
Block of four parlour houses, Braunstone Estate, 1928 (Drawing by Ned Newitt from the original plans)
Spending cuts and a cross-party emphasis on rehousing slum dwellers (previously excluded from council housing dues to its relatively high rents) from 1930 had their own impact. The North Braunstone Estate, built as a slum clearance estate, is one of many across the country that reflected both these aspects and suffered a resultant social stigma.
Another war revived housing ambitions and, with especial force following the impact of the Great Depression, fired the belief that the new Britain to emerge from wartime destruction and sacrifice should be rationally planned. JS Fyfe’s report to the Special Leicester Reconstruction Committee in December 1942 is a fine example of the latter. It’s notable too – several years before Aneurin Bevan’s more famous strictures – that Fyfe criticised the ‘mistake’ that interwar estates had been ‘populated by people of one wage level’:
Socially this is bad and people of more than one wage level, and of varying cultural standards should be encouraged to reside together in close proximity.
‘Community Centre – western area’. This drawing showing the centre of the proposed New Parks Estate was displayed at the 1944 Post-War Reconstruction Exhibition. (Image credit: Record Office for Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland)
An immediate postwar housing crisis was partially addressed by temporary prefabricated housing. Broader postwar aspirations were seen in the planning and construction of the New Parks (planned from 1943) and Eyres Monsell Estates.
A distinctive feature of Leicester was the emphasis on various forms of prefabrication and system building. So-called (concrete pier and slab) Boot Houses were built very extensively in Saffron Lane and other interwar estates. Easiform (cast in-situ concrete) and BISF (steel framed) housing, common across the country and, less commonly, Smith Houses of concrete slab construction were built in the early postwar years before another wave of prefabricated construction took off in the 1960s. According to Newitt, by 1986 46 percent of Leicester’s council housing was of non-traditional construction, compared to 15 percent in comparable authorities.
A yard off South Bond Street in 1936, showing the single tap providing the water supply. (Image credit: Record Office for Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland)
Much of that prefabricated housing had subsequently to be demolished when it could not be renovated or repaired. But at the time it was a symbol of progress and a means, it was thought, of building efficiently and economically. Lest we judge too readily, the context here is vital. Newitt reminds us that even in 1971 30 percent of Leicester’s houses lacked an inside toilet; 11 percent had no bath or shower. The ambition was to finally eradicate the slums and provide modern well-equipped housing at scale.
Nevertheless that ambition could be overweening. Newitt describes the era of Konrad Smigielski, City Planning Officer, and Stephen George, City Architect, in the 1960s as ‘a period of frenzied development that changed the face of Leicester’. The city built only ten tower blocks, a relatively low number for a city of its size, but its new regime embraced the full range of modernist design and methods wholeheartedly – with mixed results.
Iffley Close, Rowlatts Hill, built with the Laing’s Easiform system, c1968. (Image credit: Record Office for Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland)
Rowlatts Hill was built without subsidy to a particularly innovative design incorporating Radburn (traffic-free) principles for better-off tenants but came to face similar problems to other such mixed development estates across the country. St Leonard’s Court, a 11-storey point block completed in 1968 for middle-class occupation, was successful and has remained popular. The high-density four-storey deck-access and walkway St Andrew’s Estate, completed in 1971, was soon disliked. Goscote House, built for single people in 1973 (demolished 2023), morphed from the Hilton of Hillfields to ‘Hell on Earth’ according to local media.
Stephen George’s proprietary in-house battery casting process for concrete slab prefabrication used on the St Peter’s Estate of the late 1960s was a disaster and brought about the abolition of the unfortunate Direct Labour Organisation called upon to implement it.
This is a fascinating period in design and construction terms of interest beyond its Leicester borders. But Newitt is unsparing in his judgement of its local impact. Smigielski’s:
modernist adventure into housing was a disaster for the people who were housed on the estates he planned and it cost millions to rectify their deficiencies … Whilst much of the housing bult under Smigielski and George has now been demolished or rebuilt, the damage to the reputation of municipal housing in Leicester has been long-lasting.
Whilst Leicester’s travails were particularly striking, mood and policy were changing nationally with, from 1968, a clear preference for the rehabilitation of older properties rather than clearance and newbuild. By 1972 Leicester had declared 37 General Improvement Areas and its Housing Renewal Strategy came to be one of the most advanced in the country.
Newitt, who oversaw some of this work, considers it:
the most significant policy of the last 50 years. It not only succeeded in reversing inner-city decay, but it also channelled resources towards Leicester’s poorer communities. It did so without tearing down neighbourhoods …
By now, we are entering the new era of social housing (or lack of it) that we know so well from the 1980s onwards. According to Newitt, in 1979 at its peak Leicester City Council owned and managed 34,882 homes, housing around 30 percent of local households. By 2023, the figure stood at around 19,000, housing just under 15 percent of households. Leicester lost almost a quarter of its social housing stock between 1980 and 1991 to Right to Buy.
In the book’s concluding chapters, Newitt discusses amongst other things, the growth of housing associations and estate regeneration – familiar national stories with a local twist. More particular to Leicester, where now almost 60 percent of its population belong to one or other ethnic minorities, was the issue of housing equality. After years of racial discrimination, the ethnic make-up of the city’s social housing now almost exactly matches that of its wider population.
Finally, I would commend the book for its coverage of other topics – the role of tenants’ associations, controversies over rents in both public and private sectors, issues of provision for homeless people, to name just a few.
The book’s 300 pages therefore provide a comprehensive history of housing in Leicester. But I would recommend it to anyone interested in housing history as the book deftly combines an account of national dynamics and policies with the local peculiarities of people and place that should mark any genuine understanding of the topic. I’m sure it will find a deserved place on Leicester bookshelves but I think it is wider interest and relevance – to the general reader as well as students and academics in the field. I would add that it is also exceptionally well-illustrated with a range of images that complement the text at every turn. A small selection from the book is included in this post.
As we began this review with the book’s opening words, let’s also endorse its final sentence:
Although council housing has now shaken off the stigma that was attached to it in the 1980s, it has yet to be given the kind of priority and financial backing that it received in 1945.
Further details and purchasing information for the book can be found on the website of the Pioneer Press.It can be ordered from bookshops and online retailers.
Last week’s post examined Michiel Brinkman’s Justus van Effen Estate in Rotterdam, a 1920s’ pioneer of deck-access housing. Today, we look at the city’s second crucial contribution to social housing design, the Bergpolderflat scheme, completed in 1934, that provided the classic prototype of the postwar slab block.
In fact, the two schemes shared a significant lineage. Willem van Tijen, the chief promoter of the Bergpolderflat, declared it a: (1)
modern continuation of the ideas that inspired the design of the gallery building designed and executed by the late architect Brinkman in collaboration with [Engineer] Plate.
Left to right, Willem van Tijen, Johannes Brinkman and Leendert van der Vlugt
Michiel Brinkman’s son Johannes was, with Leendert van der Vlugt, a partner with van Tijen in the design of the building. City Engineer Auguste Plate was a co-founder with van Tijen of the company that promoted it.
Bergpolderflat, western aspect showing private balconies
Beyond its genuinely iconic form, the Bergpolderflat embodied a central, long-running debate within public housing provision around the necessity and the potential advantages of multi-storey accommodation. The felt imperative, then and now, was the need to build at higher density in central areas particularly where land was scarce or expensive. The claimed advantages were the fresh air and light that high-rise permitted and the freeing up of green open space between high-rise blocks. (We’ll ignore for the moment the fact that the latter might mitigate the alleged advantages of higher density.)
A second, linked, proposition was that high-rise housing might be built more quickly, efficiently and inexpensively using standardised components and prefabrication. Then and now, there was a powerful drive to build more rapidly at greater scale using systems of mass manufacture. There is nothing particularly modern about what are nowadays called modern methods of construction.
In both aspects, the Bergpolderflat were intended as a demonstration project – one that trialled and, it was hoped, demonstrated the potential of new housing forms and new building methods. Coincidentally perhaps Walter Gropius had proposed just such a high-rise gallery access block at the third meeting of CIAM (the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) in 1930. (2)
Willem van Tijen had founded NV Volkswoningbouw Rotterdam (a public housing limited company) with Plate in 1929 with the intention of pioneering new building types to house decently and efficiently a predominantly working-class population. As a prelude he put his innovative methods to the test in a small six-storey residential block designed for middle-class living (in fact he and his family were to occupy a penthouse apartment). Parklaan with its steel skeleton, glass curtain wall and novel internal configuration contained many of the features applied to the Bergpolderflat.
Both Parklaan and its later, larger counterpart embody in construction, form and ethos the characteristics of the prevalent modernist architectural ideology of the day known in Dutch as ‘Nieuwe Bouwen’ (New Building) or sometimes ‘Nieuwe Zakelijkheid’ (New Objectivity) – a functionalist style emphasising a building’s purpose should determine its form that eschewed unnecessary ornamentation. (3)
Bergpolder under construction showing steel frame and portal crane, illustrated in The Council for Research on Housing Construction, Slum Clearance and Housing (1934)
In Bergpolderflat, van Tijen used a steel-frame construction and a range of prefabricated components in the building’s internal structure. The steel skeleton enabled the non-load bearing predominantly glass curtain walls that are such a striking feature of the building. A portal crane (a shipyard crane that moved on rails) was used to facilitate its speedy building. (4)
The First Report for Research on Housing Construction (headed by the Earl of Dudley and a precursor of the 1944 Dudley Report on the Design of Dwellings), prepared even as Bergpolderflat was under construction, declared: (5)
the completion of the steel-frame for the block of 72 flats in a total of 3½ weeks’ work … a remarkable demonstration of the increased speed made possible by modern construction.
The steel frame of Bergpoldergflat illustrated in illustrated in The Council for Research on Housing Construction, Slum Clearance and Housing (1934)
The block was nine-storeys tall with eight identical gallery access flats on each level, a communal basement space, and an extended entrance area with room for three shops. The 1.3-metre-wide access gallery ran along the building’s eastern side while the western side comprised private balconies. The northern end contained the scheme’s lifts and principal staircase; emergency stairs were located at the southern end.
The internal layout was also striking. Firstly, with a floor area of around 550 square feet (51 square metres) the flats were small despite containing a living room, kitchen, shower room, separate toilet, and two bedrooms. As the floorplan illustrates, the apartments comprised two zones – a wider one containing the living room with the kitchen and services located on the gallery access side and a narrower one containing the two bedrooms – a children’s bedroom and a master bedroom that adjoined the private balcony.
Bergpolderflat, northern end entrance and stairway and lift
The potentially problems of this limited space were offset in a number of ways. Firstly, by the flat’s abundant natural light and moveable, part glass, partition walls and, secondly, reflecting a particular aspect of Nieuwe Bouwen thinking, the attempt to create a day/night cycle of space usage through the use of sliding partitions and folding beds.
Beyond this, there was a practical and ideological commitment to communal living. The basement area contained a laundry space with three shared washrooms and four drying rooms as well as an early electric washing machine, all free to use. It contained additionally storage space for bikes and prams as well as small individual storerooms for each flat.
To those who nevertheless criticised the small size of the flats, van Tijen countered that they were ‘mainly intended for young modern people who love simplicity, light and space’.
South-eastern aspect showing access gallery and emergency stairs
In other, sometimes surprising, respects, Bergpolderflat seems very much of its time. The central heating comprised one radiator (in the living room); this was apparently the Dutch standard of the day. Then, as van Tijen planned the flats to serve as affordable workers’ housing, there were cost cutting measures. The lifts opened on only every second intermediate landing leaving a half-flight of stairs up or down for every resident. As regards hot water, an internal supply was considered too costly; instead, tenants were entitled to 15 litres of free hot water daily picked up in buckets from the concierge.
The scheme received no government subsidy and was intended to be self-supporting. There was no upper income level set for residents and, despite those economising measures, the rents – set at 26 guilders a month for the lower floors and 31 guilders for the top five floors (the equivalent of around a quarter of an unskilled worker’s wage) – were too high for many. Many of the block’s new residents belonged to the middle-class.
There were also criticisms of the scheme’s appearance. The grandly named Dutch architect Marinus Jan Granpré Molière thought the block resembled a ‘a prison, where residents walk along the gallery in search of their “number”’. (6)
The Granpré Molière scheme at the junction of Abraham Kuyperlaan and Doctor de Visserstraat immediately opposite the Bergpolderflat
In fact, Granpré Molière designed his own housing scheme, completed in 1935, directly facing Bergpolderflat – a development of 282 workers’ houses in predominantly three-and four-storey terraces and a home for elderly people. For all his criticism of Bergpolderflat, his design echoed Nieuwe Bouwen themes both in its choice of materials (notably its yellow brick, steel window frames and glazed entrances) and some of its shared facilities.
In general, however, in architectural and housing circles at least: (7)
Bergpolder created a mild sensation in Europe. Leading periodicals devoted considerable space to the new Dutch “skyscraper”. Critics were generally united in praise.
One interesting demonstration of the widespread interest the scheme provoked was the 1939 report by the New Deal-sponsored Division of Foreign Housing Studies from which that quotation is drawn.
It concluded, reasonably considering the USA’s lead on such forms of construction, that the ‘average American observer will, at first, be inclined to see nothing startlingly novel in the so-called innovations’ but the report commended:
the synthesis of up-to-date developments in the various branches of building construction with several developments of their own into a rational whole that is of particular import. The synthesis was made according to one guiding principle: MECHANIZATION.
Frontispiece and illustration from Yorke and Gibberd, The Modern Flat (1937)
The block was also featured (and depicted in the book’s frontispiece) in FRS Yorke and Frederick Gibberd’s volume The Modern Flat, first published in 1937 – an influential attempt to promote modernist multi-storey housing.
In the Netherlands, as its later listing as a National Monument notes, it was (with apologies for the clunky translation): (8)
The first example of the application of the principle of large-scale assembly construction as well as of narrow galleries in high-rise buildings in public housing – in an elongated, block-shaped structure – and as such a prototype of the rational approach to the public housing problem, taking into account sunlight, optimal entry of light and air and sufficient surrounding greenery, by means of a public park; in this set-up also characteristic of the Nieuwe Bouwen.
Contemporarily, in Rotterdam, Bergpolderflat found early emulation in the Plaslaanflat designed along similar lines by van Tijen for higher income groups, and in the Zuidplein scheme commissioned by the city’s Municipal Technical Department in 1939 but built after the war in the late 1940s. (9)
Many other similar blocks would follow in the Netherlands where it became almost a standard form. But it will be familiar more widely to many of you – most notably in the schemes built in by the London County Council, in Edinburgh’s Cables Wynd House, and elsewhere.
Thoroughly renovated (and partly adapted as housing for elderly people) in 1989-1995 by the Netherlands’ then largest housing corporation, the Woningcorporatie Vestia, the Bergpolderflat looks as modern today as it did when first built.
As the American architect and architectural historian Talbot Hamlin noted back then, ‘the building has undeniable form: its pattern is clear, geometric, novel. It says what it has to say with terse vigor’. (10) Today, whilst the success of the scheme must stand or fall by the quality of its accommodation, it retains the capacity to excite and still exudes the promise of a housing revolution.
With two notable interwar schemes, the city of Rotterdam can justly claim to have shaped much of western Europe’s post-war social housing design – firstly in the Justus van Effen estate that pioneered the later fashion for ‘streets in the sky’, secondly in the Bergpolderflat building that established the classic form of the slab block. This week’s post will focus on the former.
A rare glimpse of older Rotterdam. The Delfshaven district was incorporated into the city in 1886 and escaped the heavy bombing that destroyed much of the central area.
Europe’s largest port had modest beginnings, a dam across the Rotte river in 1270 that gave an initially small fishing village its name. The settlement gained city status in 1340 and grew to become a significant trading hub. In the 17th century, as the Netherlands experienced its so-called Golden Age, the city grew wealthy from international trade, including the trade in enslaved people. Commercial expansion followed and Rotterdam’s population grew from around 54,000 in 1800 to 379,000 by 1905.
Housing conditions in a confined inner city deteriorated sharply; cheaply built suburbs added to slum conditions. Rotterdam expanded its population and borders into surrounding polders (low-lying land reclaimed from river and sea) in initially unplanned fashion but in 1913 AC Burgdorffer, the City’s Director of Municipal Works, urged the Council to intervene. (1) The newly drained Spangen district was earmarked as an area of planned development.
There was, at the same time, a broader national trend towards housing reform: (2)
longstanding traditions of municipal autonomy and separate social provision by Catholic, Protestant and socialist organisations … fuelled what would soon become Europe’s most comprehensive system of arms-length housing provision, targeted firmly at the better-off working class.
Propelled by housing crisis and increased working-class organisation, the government passed a ground-breaking Housing Law (Woningwet in Dutch) in 1901 that promoted both housing reform (though building regulation and measures to tackle overcrowding) and public housing. For the latter, the structure and duties of non-profit housing associations were formalised and made subject to municipal regulation while the associations themselves were given access to low-cost public loans.
The urban plan of Spangen. The Justus van Effen Estate can be seen in the bottom left corner.
In 1916, Rotterdam set up its own Gemeentelijke Woningsdienst (municipal housing department) led by the civil engineer August Plate and architect JJP Oud. In the following year, the department formulated a masterplan for Spangen, intended as a model for future planning with a number of leading Dutch architects (including Oud himself) commissioned to complete different sectors. The district (3)
was a sign of promise. In its symmetric form, the neighbourhood of Spangen seems to bear witness to the optimistic mood of the era. It was assumed that the social misery accompanying early industrialisation had been overcome and a more balanced society, based on rational planning, would eventually emerge.
Meanwhile, contemporary politics enhanced the role of the national and local state. The Netherlands did not fight in the First World War but the war’s collateral economic and social impact led to the introduction of rent controls in 1918. Private sector and housing association construction dropped sharply as a result and municipal authorities stepped into the breach. In 1919, local councils built five times as many houses as the housing associations; by 1927, as conditions normalised, just twice as many.
Michiel Brinkman, undated photograph
In Rotterdam in 1918, Auguste Plate appointed Michiel Brinkman to design what became the Justus van Effen estate (named after an early 18th century Dutch writer in case you’re wondering). Brinkman was an interesting choice, known principally for his design of factories, offices, and warehouses.
Axonometric view of the estate
A drawing of the estate by Brinkman, 1922
He applied similar principles to his new commission; preliminary drawings indicated ‘the anticipated delivery routes of milkmen and local bakers and sketched out flows of garbage collection, energy supply, and foot traffic’. In architectural terms, this was classic functionalism – the belief that form should follow function and an associated commitment to plain, unornamented design. (4)
Exterior view of estate
Central service block
In Spangen, Brinkman designed a complex of 264 homes with one large block, 147m by 85m, encircling a courtyard containing some smaller residential blocks and a tall central service block that contained a central heating plant, baths, laundry, drying rooms and cycle storage. A public street enters through high arches and snakes through the complex. One commentary notes how: (5)
The massiveness and density of the exterior, which more or less consciously refers to the medieval city, fades inside, giving way to a garden city model.
The genius of Brinkman’s design lay in this combination of what the architect Joris Molenaar has called ‘garden-village development, whilst using a stacked construction’. The four-storey residential blocks comprised one-storey flats on first and second levels, each with ground level access and their own gardens, and above them two-storey maisonettes.
Estate interior, 1924
Interior courtyard and gallery
The crucial innovation that made this possible was the two-to three-metre-wide, one-kilometre-long access gallery that circled the estate at third floor level. Balcony access – as the ubiquitous tenement blocks of the London County Council testify – was a common enough device at this point, enabling multi-storey accommodation and reducing the need for expensive stairwells. In the Justus van Effen estate, there were ten stairwells overall though with the rare addition of two freight lifts permitting those trolley deliveries Brinkman had anticipated.
Estate interior
But this bovenstraat in Dutch (meaning upper street but more freely translated as a ‘street in the sky’) went much further. Practically, facing internally into the courtyard and of additional width, it was also both a private space and a space to socialise for the estate’s residents. Architecturally, it combined old and new styles of living – the traditional Dutch village was now integrated into the metropolis on top of urban tenements. (6)
Brinkman himself hoped that the gallery and shared facilities ‘would induce “a certain sense of solidarity” that would make this “experiment” a success’. (7)
Others, however, found the walkway (and the flat roof typical of modernism) alarming: (8)
That two-metre space would become an endless to-do of children playing, neighbours arguing and suppliers fighting. What’s more, the 264 families will share one big flat roof and Mr Verheul [architect and city councillor] was very much afraid that it would be used for orgies that would raise a blush in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
Mr Verheul’s vivid imaginings were not borne out and the evidence suggests that the walkway, with its tiled railings and integrated flower boxes, became a popular and well-used feature.
Internally, the homes were modern, containing a living room, kitchen and toilet and three bedrooms. They were the first social rent homes in the Netherlands to be centrally heated.
Interior view with central service block to rear
Sixty or so years on, the importance of the estate was recognised by the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands in 1985 when it was declared a national monument due to its ‘urban and architectural-historical value, as well as from the viewpoint of the development of public housing’.
But what was once modern had grown old. The estate had begun to look shabby; its flats were considered too small for contemporary tastes and needs. From the 1960s, better-off residents fled both the estate and the wider Spangen area to better and newer housing elsewhere. And typically, a new migrant population moved into the poorer and cheaper housing vacated. By the 1990s, Spangen was rated the most deprived neighbourhood in Rotterdam, noted for its ‘high unemployment, ethnic tensions [and] high incidence of mostly drugs-related criminality’. (9)
The first renovation of the estate took place between 1985 and 1990. The principal substantive reform was to create fewer, larger homes by merging smaller apartments – 264 homes were reduced to 164. Each home was provided its own shower and central heating. Some stairwells were blocked and the freight lifts decommissioned due to problems of antisocial behaviour.
An image of the estate after the first renovation
But this was, essentially, a cost-driven exercise paying little respect to the estate’s original design and ethos, as seen most crudely in the decision to paint over masonry interiors to conceal repair work. Within ten years, this botched refurbishment had failed both visually as the white painted facades deteriorated and socially as the estate’s reputation plummeted further.
The estate’s owners Woonstad, the city’s largest housing association, determined a second major renovation was needed but this time a restorative refurbishment that honoured the character and features of the original design. The work was completed in 2012. This was to be ‘100% MoNUment’ – a slogan that played on ‘nu’ (the Dutch word for now) ‘not only meaning a monument all the way, but also a monument of the present’. (10)
The restoration team – architectural practices Molenaar & Co. and Hebly Theunissen, and landscape architect Michael van Gessel – won the 2016 World Monuments Fund/Knoll Modernism Prize for its work. (11)
Contemporary office space (with thanks to Matthew Cook)
Stairwells were restored and lifts reinstated; yellow-and-red-brick facades were cleaned and repaired and woodwork was re-painted in original shades of white, green and ochre. Further reconfiguration of housing units reduced the overall total to 154 but the opportunity was taken to soundly insulate the whole estate to meet contemporary standards. The central service block was re-designed and currently contains a café, workspace and arts organisation.
The eastern corner of the estate
That, of course, suggests a shift in the nature of the estate. Some of the new and restored homes were offered for sale and now only around 30 percent of the estate is social rented. There may be benefits to this greater income mix but, as Thomas Wemsing observes: (12)
the part-privatization of this iconic social housing project also reflects an unfortunate development in the once-progressive housing policies of the Netherlands.
In its earlier heyday, the estate was an inspiration to Le Corbusier (for whom the internal corridors of the Unité d’habitation represented a form of ‘streets in the sky’, the Smithsons in their designs for the Golden Lane Estate and Robin Hood Gardens, and the prime British exemplar of the concept, the Park Hill Estate in Sheffield.
As a contemporary visitor, the Justus van Effen estate in its fully restored state remains a superb illustration of both a principled, progressive vision of social housing and its skilled implementation. Its chequered history reminds us to avoid crude architectural determinism and those assessments of public housing that impute some original sin to its form and ethos and supposed elements of ‘design disadvantage’ whilst ignoring how estates and residents are so powerfully affected by broader circumstance.
The last word should go to the paean offered to the estate by Arie (AW) Heijkoop, a socialist alderman of the city, in a 1928 volume celebrating Rotterdam’s 600th anniversary. (He also noted the early death of Michiel Brinkman – ‘one of its younger masters’ – in 1925.) (13)
The great Brinkman plan, with its upper galleries 7m above street level and of approximately 800m length, on which the baker, the milkman and the greengrocer can wheel along their carts with ease, and access the ground floor door, without the housewife needing to walk downstairs, is an extraordinary example of modern public housing. These dwellings, provided with block heating and special refuse chutes, with neat built-in kitchen counters, appointed with modern ablutions, closely approach the ideals of urban housing. The gardens between the various blocks, the bath- and washing provisions in the centre, complete this neat complex, of which our city can justly be proud.
Postscript
I’m very grateful to Matthew Cook who supplied the following photographs taken this week having read the blog post. He commented – as will be seen from the images – just how successful the renovation has been and how well the deck is used.
(2) Miles Glendinning, Mass Housing: Modern Architecture and State Power – a Global History
(3) Jack Burgers and Robert Kloosterman, ‘Dutch Comfort: Post-industrial Transition and Social Exclusion in Spangen, Rotterdam’, Area, December 1996, No. 4 Vol. 28
(6) Wolfgang Sonne, Dwelling in the metropolis: reformed urban blocks 1890-1940. Project Report. University of Strathclyde and Royal Institute of British Architects, Glasgow, (2005)
Gidea Park, now in the London Borough of Havering, has hosted two significant housing exhibitions. Both were held to promote housing reform and innovation, better homes for new times albeit with a very distinct focus on middle-class needs and aspirations. In 1911, as we saw in last week’s post, that meant, with the arts and crafts movement in full swing, a return paradoxically to more traditional and vernacular forms, at least superficially. The few neo-Georgian designs in the Exhibition were held by their advocates to represent something more ostensibly and practically modern. In 1934, the mandate was to embrace a whole-hearted modernism that rejected and superseded all past styles. Today’s post examines how far that ambition succeeded.
The cover of the 1934 Exhibition guide
Sir Herbert Raphael, the chief instigator of the 1911 Exhibition, had died in 1924. His de facto successor in Gidea Park Ltd (the organisational force behind both exhibitions) was his nephew – not his son as mistakenly stated in Pevsner – Major RA (Ralph) Raphael. It was a conversation in 1933 between Raphael and architect and planner Raymond Unwin, then president of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), that led to the new competition that would select the 35 houses to feature in the 1934 Modern Homes Exhibition.
For all the apparent radicalism of the later venture, there were distinct echoes with 1911. As in 1911: (1)
one of the primary objects of the Gidea Park Modern Homes Exhibition [was] to bring the architect and the speculative builder into closer working touch for the improvement of housing in general.
In the Exhibition guide, Raphael observed the ‘miniature towns … springing up with mushroom alacrity’ and decried the ‘machine-made rabbit hutches’ they comprised. Elsewhere, Unwin, as car ownership grew, arterial roads spread and speculative housebuilding boomed, condemned the ‘the ribbon development that disgraces this country’. His successor, as president of RIBA, Sir Gilbert Scott attacked the ‘housing schemes … put up by builders from a few “stock” plans … ruining many parts of England’. (2)
It was an approach that merged a sincere desire for better design and planning with an equally sincere concern for the professional standing and interests of architects.
Again as in 1911, there was a strong emphasis on labour-saving design and fittings, with lingering reference to the Servant Problem – the lack of working people willing to labour domestically for the upper classes – that had already alarmed the Edwardians. The competition entries would ‘demonstrate the most recent developments in all that pertains to British architecture, building, building materials, housing and garden accessories’.
In a clear contrast with the past, however, the new exhibition aimed to promote an explicitly modernist form of domestic architecture. Maxwell Fry, Britain’s leading modernist architect, put the case trenchantly in his contribution to the Exhibition guide entitled ‘The Changing World’:
Ridiculously enough, we have gone backward, for all these nice new family houses, gradually altering themselves within to suit our needs so well, are all pretending to look like houses built in Elizabeth’s time, or George I’s time, or Queen Anne’s time. How extraordinary!
Now architects are saying that we have no need to go backwards at all; that we are quite able to stand on our own feet and build houses that belong to us entirely and not to any past period of English history.
Raphael stated ambitiously the aim:
To combine the most modern British homes, as exemplified here, with the ideas of the public, in order to produce a house type which will indicate a general standard of domestic building throughout Great Britain.
It is by this measure perhaps that the success or failure of the Exhibition can best be measured.
An impressive 475 entries were submitted to the competition, judged by a panel of leading architects and planners that included Fry himself as well as SD Adshead, Ewart G Culpin, AE Beresford, Howard Robertson and W Harding Thompson.
The competition comprised five categories ranging the cheapest Class A and Class B semi-detached homes at £400 and £500 each, for which most entries were received, to Classes C, D and E made up of detached houses and garages costing from £650 to £900.
The judges themselves provided a handy checklist of the character of entries. There were some they described as ‘designs of traditional character’ (meaning here principally neo-Georgian); some they termed ‘mock moderns’ – demonstrating ‘the tricks but not the logic of good contemporary design’. A large group combined traditional materials and construction with modernist forms; ‘an intelligent compromise between old and new methods’, they thought. (3)
Finally, they singled out ‘two designs … offering a complete departure from traditions both in plan, construction, and consequently in general design’. We’ll come back to these but we’ll note for the time being how, in the judges’ words, in these houses the ‘“plastic” qualities of reinforced concrete … enabled the designers to plan on a basic of the exact functioning of the domestic machine’. The final phrase was presumably a knowing reference to Le Corbusier’s dictum that ‘A house is a machine for living in’ (Towards an Architecture,1923).
Since:
The competition was expressly for modern homes … preference was given as far as possible to designs avoiding the hackneyed and stereotyped designs so universal in small house building.
The advert placed in the Daily Telegraph
Thirty-five winning entries were built and the Exhibition opened on 31 July 1934 and ran for three weeks. An advert in the Daily Telegraph provided a hard sell of all its claims and promises: (4)
The most remarkable show of its kind that you have ever seen! All the wonders of modern home-planning, building, furnishing, decoration – brought together in one fascinating full-scale exhibition.
With entertainment, excellent catering, good music, cheap tickets from Liverpool Street and ample parking and, finally, capturing something of the would-be glamour of the age, ‘Aeroplanes available for all wishing to see the Exhibition from the air’.
What did you see whether on the ground or from above? Internally, these were (almost entirely), to borrow Fry’s phrase, ‘servantless’ homes and that more informal middle-class lifestyle led to living rooms that combined formerly separate dining- and drawing-rooms. Kitchen and sculleries were also combined to create ‘a single domestic workshop equipped with gas or electric cooker, electric refrigerator, and other features of modern equipment.’ (5)
Externally, visitors would see a range of materials in use – concrete rarely, cream-coloured bricks more commonly, and tiles of different colours. Two-colour decoration was in vogue – contrasting shades on facing walls that ‘brought out unexpected beauties of light, shadow, and angle’. There were large, usually steel-framed windows too but the most obvious distinguishing mark and a cliché of modern architecture was the flat roof. (6)
312-314 Eastern Avenue East
The winner of the Class A category of cheapest semi-detached homes was an entry from JR Moore-Simpson built at 312 -314 Eastern Avenue East. They form a modest, brick-built pair; the Exhibition Guide comments that:
the materials have been selected for durability, and have been adapted in the design to suit modern requirements … Internally every effort has been made to provide an easily worked house and to reduce upkeep to a minimum.
It presumably represented what the judges had called ‘an intelligent compromise between old and new methods’
320-22 Eastern Avenue East, rear view, as depicted in the Architects’ Journal, 1934
322 Eastern Avenue East in 2024
But the one they got excited about in Class A and one of the two designs they had particularly noted, was 320-322 Eastern Avenue East designed by Holford, Stevenson & Yorke. (Pevsner incorrectly lists it as 328-30 Eastern Avenue.) No. 320 is now in a sorry state and its neighbour much modified. The Architects’ Journal critic called them a ‘very modern and quite delightful pair’. This was the first house designed by FRS Yorke, then aged 27, but he was already emerging as one of the country’s leading exponent of modernist design, the author of The Modern House in 1934 and, with Frederick Gibberd, The Modern Flat in 1937. (7)
344-46 Eastern Avenue East
348-50 Eastern Avenue East
Also arrayed along Eastern Avenue are the winning entries of the Class B category. (It’s perhaps not coincidental that the cheaper exhibition houses were located on what even then must have been a busy main road.) Scott, Chesterton & Shepherd’s design, now substantially altered, at 340-342 Eastern Avenue East came first. (Scott was Elisabeth Scott, the only female architect to feature in the Exhibition.) Further along 344-46 by Maxwell Allen and 348-50 by Andrews & Duke echo the compromise design seen in the Moore-Simpson pair described earlier.
15 Brook Road
Moore Simpson obviously hit a sweet spot of design finesse, sturdy construction and convenient living so far as the judges were concerned because his Class C detached home at 15 Brook Road was placed first in its category.
13 Brook Road, then and now
18 Brook Road, then and now
Other designs in the category – by Geoffrey Ransom at 13 Brook Road and Anthony Minoprio and Geoffrey Spencely at 18 Brook Road maintained a similar form with a more dashing and ostensibly ‘modern’ appearance though subsequent owners did much to modify them.
3 Brook Road, then and now
Moving to Category D, essentially a price point, LW Thornton White took first prize with his house at 3 Brook Road, seen above both in its original pristine form and currently. You can play Spot the Difference and judge for yourself the extent to which the original design has been improved (and perhaps it has for those living in the house) or corrupted.
1 Brook Road
Significant changes have also been imposed (it’s not fair to say ‘inflicted’ unless you’re an architectural absolutist) on 1 Brook Road in the same category designed by HS and FR Pite, ‘planned from the start to provide the largest possible living space, consistent with modern requirements of light and air’, according to the Exhibition Guide; ‘the living room and dining recess, which is fitted with an electric fire, will give a floor area considerably in excess of many much larger houses’.
64 Heath Drive in 2024
If you are an architectural purist or a fan of serious modernism, I’ve saved the best till last. 64 Heath Drive, designed by Francis Skinner and Tecton, is the only (Grade II) listed house of the modern homes. It is the second of the two houses considered of special note by the competition assessors; one of the few constructed of reinforced concrete and uncompromisingly modern in appearance.
64 Heath Drive, depicted in the Architects’ Journal, 1934
Skinner, its principal architect, was just 26 when it was completed, already the closest associate of Berthold Lubetkin in the Tecton group the latter founded in 1932. Skinner, a Communist Party activist at this time, would be a significant contributor to public housing design in Finsbury in subsequent years. Here, ironically, this house, in the most expensive Class E category, was one of the few to have servant’s quarters though, in civilised fashion, these were ‘a maid’s domain, complete with bedroom and bathroom’. (8)
The architect and writer John Allan describes: (9)
Though still decidedly primitive in expression, detail and construction, an effort to master the Corbusian essentials is evident from the conscientious inclusion of piloti, strip fenestration, roof terraces …, proscenium screen opening and promenade stairway.
It also, to the untutored eye, just looks exceptional, especially since having been restored to something much nearer its original appearance (and repainted, I think, since my visit in 2024). With its L-plan form providing a sun terrace and enclosed garden, ‘it remains’, according to its Historic England listing, ‘a sophisticated, intelligent design, providing optimum levels of privacy and natural light’. (10)
It was also, as Pevsner reminds us, ‘designed for repetition along Heath Drive to form a continuous white-walled frontage, a daring idea and one alive to ideas of new forms of social housing rather than the one-off villa’.
62 Heath Drive
60 Heath Drive
That wasn’t feasible in the context of the 1934 Exhibition. Instead, its immediate neighbour 62 Heath Drive is an art deco-influenced design (including a rare pitched pantiled roof) by John Leach whilst 60 Heath Drive, by Chesterton & Shepherd, is more conventionally modernist in form whilst being brick-built.
Balgores Crescent
As a final footnote, it’s worth travelling south of the main road to the Balgores extension of the Gidea Park estate. On Balgores Crescent, you’ll see a row of ‘suntrap houses’; ‘a tentative modernist offshoot of a speculative house building tendency that specialised in the mock-Tudor or ‘Jacobethan’ styles’, according to Joe Mathiesen, dubbed ‘bogus modern’ by some but, more evocatively, as ‘Jazz Moderne’ by John Betjeman. At any rate, they were a more popular and common feature of the London suburbs than the more purely modernist designs featured in the 1934 Exhibition. (11)
The advert for Geddy Court on the inside cover of the 1934 Exhiition guide
Nearby, there is Geddy Court, developed in 1934 by the same Gidea Park Ltd that had promoted the Modern Homes show. It’s condemned by Pevsner as ‘a completely spiritless block of flats’ and it is, in truth, undistinguished but it’s a modest example of the mansion blocks that were a booming form of middle-class accommodation in the 1930s.
Those preceding comments beg the question how successful was the Modern Homes Exhibition and to what extent did it fulfil its stated aim ‘to combine the most modern British homes … with the ideas of the public’. You probably feel you know the answer.
The anonymous critic of the Architects’ Journal, in an otherwise laudatory piece on 64 Heath Drive, perhaps touched on something essential: (12)
But still there seems to be something missing – a face, an expression. The fact is that a mass of new scientific knowledge and constructional methods, equipment, etc., has been available to architects for some time, and should now be well-known; but still their buildings appear to appeal to the public more on intellectual grounds, on self-conscious presentation of this knowledge, or these constructional methods, rather than on any real architectural beauty.
The reviewer in Country Life, less jaundiced than you might assume as he (presumably he) thought the Exhibition as a whole ‘a most commendable effort’, nevertheless questioned the predominance of the flat roof – as an accessible space, no better than a garden and ill-suited to the British climate: ‘Personally, I believe it to be more of a stunt than anything else’. (13)
The Observer, modelling a more forward-looking outlook, contended that the ‘young people love the modern concrete houses. Elderly people think the Tecton house would be like “living out of doors”’.
In general, as we have also seen in our long-running account of public housing, modernism made very little headway in interwar Britain. Those who sympathised with modernist methods and forms looked to the Continent and regretted that Gidea Park could not ‘touch either the Stuttgart or the Vienna Exhibitions, and purely because we have not gone far enough upon the road we are travelling’. (14)
Within the architectural profession, the benefits of architect-designed houses were asserted to have been amply demonstrated but the market – dominated by speculative builders with a trained eye for profit – suggested something else. The British middle-class, purchasing homes on an unprecedented scale in the building boom of the 1930s, preferred something that seemed to them more obviously homely, the stock designs lamented by Sir Gilbert Scott and the backward-looking pastiches of past styles condemned by Maxwell Fry.
Sources
(1) Gidea Park Modern Homes Exhibition Official Catalogue and Guide(1934)
(2) Unwin quoted in ‘Modern Homes Exhibition Gidea Park’, Architects’ Journal, 2 August 1934 and ‘Sir Gilbert Scott on the New Gidea Park Exhibition’, Architects’ Journal, 6 September 1934
(3) ‘Competition News’, Architects’ Journal, 7 December 1933
(4) Advertisement, Daily Telegraph, 17 July 1934
(5) ‘An Exhibition of Modern Houses at Gidea Park’, Country Life, 4 August 1934
(6) ‘The Liveable House. Architects and New Conditions. Exhibition at Gidea Park’, The Observer, 19 August 1934
(7) Bridget Cherry, Charles O’Brien and Nikolaus Pevsner, London 5 East (2005) and M.O.D., ‘Modern Homes Exhibition Gidea Park, Architects’ Journal, 19 July 1934
(8) M.O.D., ‘Modern Homes Exhibition Gidea Park’
(9) John Allan, Berthold Lubetkin: Architecture and the Tradition of Progress (2013)
(12) House at Gidea Park, Essex, Architects’ Journal, 6 September 1934
(13) ‘An Exhibition of Modern Houses at Gidea Park’, Country Life
(14) M.O.D., ‘Modern Homes Exhibition Gidea Park’
The Modernism in Metroland blog has also written about the 1934 Exhibition and more broadly on Art Deco, Modernism and Brutalism in the suburbs of London and beyond.
Romford might be an unsung part of London but in Gidea Park, as host of two housing exhibitions – a competition in 1911 founding what was then known as Romford Garden Suburb and a Modern Homes Exhibition in 1934 – it contains some of the capital’s most historically interesting housing. This isn’t going to be a regular post celebrating local government’s contribution to that housing history – on the contrary, it will chart the role of private developers – but it should shed light on a broader movement of housing reform and some of its successes and failures. We’ll discuss the 1911 Exhibition in this post.
The Exhibition guide
We could begin with the early medieval estate of Gidea Hall deep in the then Essex countryside. Even in 1910, the Times (though perhaps reflecting its elite bias) noted the ‘fine open nature of the surrounding country … shown by the fact that as many as three hunts and a pack of harriers meet near at hand’. (1)
Sir Herbert Raphael, photographed in 1906
We’ll start more practically with the rebuilt 18th century hall and its grounds purchased by Sir Herbert Raphael in 1897. Raphael was a barrister and Liberal politician: a Progressive member of the London County Council and London School Board and later a Liberal member of Essex County Council and Liberal MP.
Raphael Park
He donated some 15 acres of the estate to Romford Urban District Council in 1902 to form Raphael Park. It was beautifully landscaped by Herbert Thomas Ridge, an Assistant Surveyor for the Council, and dubbed a ‘modern arcadia’. It’s still well worth a visit.
But Raphael’s larger ambitions lay elsewhere. Gidea Park Ltd, with Liberal MPs architect John Tudor Walters and barrister Charles McCurdy, as fellow directors was formed in 1910. The new company took over the management of 441 acres of the estate and, crucially to its plans, purchased an additional 60 acres of land south of the appropriately if unimaginatively named Main Road that linked it to the new Gidea Park & Squirrels Heath railway station opened in December 1910. (2)
As London and its railway network expanded, the capital’s suburbs grew prodigiously. John Burns, President of the Local Government Board, spoke of ‘13,000 to 16,000 families [leaving] the central parishes of London every year’. But housebuilding was ‘largely left to the uncertain, unscientific, uneconomical, unsocial and inartistic activities of the Speculative Builder’. (3)
Raphael’s intention was to create a planned garden suburb exemplifying the best of contemporary architecture and design. His method was to organise a competition and exhibition, showcasing to the general public what the substantial accompanying brochure called ‘The Hundred Best Houses’ resulting from these combined efforts of architects and builders.
A total of £1050 was offered in prize money, chiefly to reward the best so-called Class I detached houses costing up to £500 to build and the best smaller ‘Class II cottages’ costing up to £375; additional prizes were offered for garden design, drawing and workmanship. Some 121 architects – some in partnership – participated to create the 159 homes (of which 132 were competition entries) that featured in the exhibition formally opened by John Burns in June 1911.
The guide sums up admirably, with erratic capitalisation all its own, the exhibition’s aims:
To demonstrate to Housing and Town Planning Authorities, to Builders and to the Public generally, the improvement in modern housing and building, due to the advance of Scientific Knowledge, the Revival of Arts and Crafts, and the Progress of the Garden Suburb movement, and by so doing to assist in raising the standard of Housing, not only in the Outer Metropolis, but throughout Great Britain.
It would show ‘the infinite variety that will be possible in House building when skilful architects are employed to build the new Town-planned Suburbs of London’.
And, crucially because this was of course contemporary housing, it would demonstrate ‘how changed are the ideas of modern architects with regard to planning and fitting’. The guide promised:
a hundred new ideas that make for economy in upkeep, that save domestic labour, or lessen the need for repairs. The modern house must be pleasant to live in as well as pleasant to look at.
‘The inconvenience and discomfort of the Victorian houses [was] gone’, it proclaimed.
This was, needless to say, middle-class housing and that focus on convenience reflected not just technological progress but a looming ‘Servant Problem’ – the problem being that fewer women and girls were willing to submit to the low pay and indignities of domestic service.
This modernising perspective was amplified in a substantial section of the guide, to which a large number of the Edwardian Great and the Good contributed, dedicated to the question What Is Wrong with Your House and How It Is to Be Bettered. Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett, Mrs Despard, Mrs Fawcett and HG Wells were among the respondents.
It’s an interesting read with a broad consensus demanding fewer rooms, better light and less clutter, and again emphasising the need for labour-saving design and fittings. We might now see this as, at best, a quasi-feminist demand; one made both by women and men but one firmly rooted in the notion of home as a female domestic sphere. Nevertheless, it’s a male writer, JW Robertson, who expresses inimitably the perspective most strongly:
Surely, the Basic Fact is that Structures, which are to “be lived in most of the time” by Women. and are to be wholly worked by Women, are planned by MEN, chiefly “single men in barracks” of offices?
I’m not aware of any figures telling how many attended the exhibition but it was heavily promoted. Direct trains ran daily from London Liverpool Street station and 5000 free rail passes were offered to readers of the Daily Chronicle; 2500 were apparently snapped up with three days. (4) Widespread coverage in the general and specialist press also suggest that it received substantial, broadly positive, attention.
54 Parkway, as illustrated in the 1911 guide
So, what were the fruits of all this effort? Well, you can see for yourself if you take the train to what is now called Gidea Park Station but we’ll pick out some highlights. The Class I winner was no.54 Parkway designed by Geoffrey Lucas – a rare neo-Georgian design of ‘symmetrical and simple character’ according to the guide.
36 Meadway, as illustrated in the 1911 guide
34 Meadway
It’s counterpart among the Class II cottages was no.36 Meadway designed by CM Crickmer, best known for his substantial contributions to both Letchworth Garden City and Hampstead Garden Suburb. He also designed no. 34Meadway next door (which I did get round to photographing). The first has a single sitting room, the latter two but both were planned to be built in semi-detached form if desired and with ‘drainage and plumbing … economically arranged’.
16 Meadway
No. 16 Meadway, picked out by Pevsner, by Philip Tilden was another Class II-winning design. The guide emphasised its ‘aspect’ with its living room unusually facing south onto the garden as well as its central flues that ‘help to warm the whole house’.
41 Heath Drive, as illustrated in the 1911 guide
In looking at houses that might resonate more for municipal dreamers, no. 41 Heath Drive was the work of Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin – Parker well-known for his later work on Manchester City Council’s Wythenshawe Estate and Unwin, the leading housing reformer of his day and the chief author of the Tudor Walters Report that set the standards for post-war housing in 1918.
57 Heath Drive, as illustrated in the 1911 guide
No. 57 Heath Drive was the design of GL Pepler & EJ Allen who had also contributed to the Yorkshire and North Midland Cottage Exhibition in 1907, the foundation of the city’s Flower Estate.
35 Meadway
3-7 Elm Walk
W Curtis Green, the architect of no. 35 Meadway, no. 43 Heath Drive and nos3, 5 and 7 Elm Walk, designed one of the finest council estates built in the early phase of post-First World War idealism, the Stanmore Estate in Winchester.
12 Reed Pond Walk
26 Reed Pond Walk
Briefly noted here as a taste of the dominant style of the designs are nos 12 and 26 Reed Pond Walk, where many of the Class I houses are clustered, designed by H Townshend Morgan and T Millwood Wilson respectively. No. 19 Meadway is a Class II cottage, the work of Ernest Willmott.
19-23 Meadway
What stands out, of course, and what was noted by critics, was the prevalence in the words of SD Adshead (who would emerge as a leading planner of municipal housing) of ‘the English cottage style’ –owing much to Norman Shaw and Edwin Lutyens – and an ‘abnormally picturesque’ overall appearance. Evelyn Sharp, the women’s rights campaigner, peace activist and Manchester Guardian journalist, berated the harking back to an ‘uncomfortable and cobwebby period of domestic architecture the Tudor’ though she did acknowledge that the ‘modern artistic house, with its grotesque exterior and its exaggerated medievalism, is at least better to live in than look upon’. (5)
45-48 Heath Drive
Sharp asked rhetorically ‘why not emulate Georgan architecture … Georgian houses, good to look upon and good to live in and keep clean, without gables or turrets or overhanging roofs’. And both Sharp and Adshead noted favourably nos 45 to 48 Heath Drive, not competition entries but a rare neo-Georgian terrace in the suburb designed by Ronald Potter Jones. (Jones was a leading exponent of this emerging style that would be dominant in interwar council housing. He was later a Progressive and Liberal member of London County Council.)
27-37 Squirrel’s Heath Avenue
It’s worth looking south of Main Road at the Balgores extension (en route to or from the station) as it was also intended as an integral element of the new Suburb. The area contains some competition entries but is most notable for nos 27-37 Squirrel’s Heath Avenue – not entered into the competition –designed by CR Ashbee and Gripper & Stevenson. Ashbee was a prime mover in the arts and crafts movement but here he and his collaborators chose elevations that (in the words of the exhibition guide) were ‘purposely … kept quiet and restrained’. The houses were planned as one half of an ellipse that was not completed.
Hare Lane shops
Ashbee and Gripper & Stevenson adopted a more flamboyant form in shops built on Hare Hall Lane in Queen Anne Revival style. These were originally conceived as a continuous terrace but the ambition to create a vibrant commercial centre for the suburb failed and what you see now is a ‘composition … rudely divided in two by Geddy Court, a completely spiritless block of flats of 1937’. (6)
This is significant for, in key respects, the hopes expressed for the Suburb were a failure. The failed shopping centre was central to this but other elements also went unfulfilled. Plans to extend the suburb to the east were abandoned and far more conventional housing of its time was built on the undeveloped plots that remained on the exhibition site.
But maybe the most significant obstacle to the Garden Suburb’s full flowering was the First World War. Practically, it marked a massive disruption to the private housing market but, critically, psychologically, it opened a new era, one looking to the past not as inspiration but as failure.
Here the construction of Eastern Avenue – a busy arterial road sharply marking the northern border of the Suburb that opened in 1926 – seems to mark the end of an idyll and the beginnings of something more intrusively modern. Gidea Hall, mooted as a civic centre for Gidea Park, was demolished in 1930.
Gidea Park stands out as: (7)
a late example of the local landowner as entrepreneur; the social ideals of the garden city and late Arts & Crafts movement combining with shrewd land investment to establish a discrete high-quality suburb.
The attempt to develop the Suburb and promote a progressive contemporary architecture and design in a Modern Homes Exhibition organised in 1934 will be discussed in next week’s post.
Sources
(1) ‘The Growth of Outer London: Gidea Park’, The Times 12 October 1910
(5) SD Adshead, Romford Garden Suburb, Gidea Park Cottage Exhibition and Town Plan, The Town Planning Review, Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1911 and Evelyn Sharp, ‘The Newest Garden Suburb’, Manchester Guardian 15 June 1911
(6) Bridget Cherry, Charles O’Brien and Nikolaus Pevsner, London 5 East (Yale University Press, 2005)
(7) London Borough of Havering, Gidea Park Conservation Area Character Appraisal and Management Proposals, prepared by The Paul Drury Partnership (ND)
An exhibition on Lambeth’s council housing between 1965 and 1980 is taking place this month at the Lambeth Archives (16 Brixton Hill, London, SW2 1ET). I’m very pleased to feature this guest post by Christiane Felber who curated the exhibition. Christiane’s grounding is in architectural practice, working in London since graduating in 2003 from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Her involvement in residential work took her to examine and reflect on historic council housing, disentangling cultural, political, social and economic factors present in London. With her PhD research in Architectural & Urban History & Theory about the inner London borough of Lambeth’s council housing of 1965-80, she aims to contribute to improve living standards in today’s metropolis, through learning from the past and towards an equal society.
Lambeth built some of the most significant and interesting council housing of the 1960s and 1970s. A selection of material about Lambeth’s public housing as conceived and constructed between 1965 and 1980 is being shown in a small exhibition at Lambeth’s Archives during this September’s Lambeth Heritage Festival. Between 1965 and 1980 England’s public authorities built more housing than ever before or since. Lambeth Council’s architectural output of the period stands out for being versatile, contextual, and of mostly ‘Scandinavian’ type Modernism, in contrast to the better-researched British New Brutalism. The Lambeth sample also exemplifies the difficulties of dense inner-city areas in the 1960s and 1970s. A review of how councils provided and how people lived together in inner-city areas in order to learn from it is relevant not least since a significant proportion of the world’s population is likely to live in similar urban conditions in the future. (1)
The drawings, brochures, and photographs in this exhibition were collected by interviewees, people involved in the design and construction of the estates, as well as former and current residents. Where not stated otherwise the material is now held within the collections of Lambeth Archives. Supplementary illustrations are taken from Lambeth Archive’s existing collections. ‘Agreed interviews’ will be stored and made accessible online on Lambeth Archives’ website for future research. Along with direct inspection of the buildings, literature review and archival research, the volunteer interviewees informed the research and made it more relatable.
The project is timely when considering questions of rehabilitation and regeneration that face current residents and Lambeth Council. Years of neglect and lack of funding have resulted in the threat of demolition and ‘planning blight’ looming over some of these estates. The current affordable housing shortage and threats to existing affordable housing in large parts of London give this research project particular immediacy and relevance. Many councils are replacing housing stock with new higher-density schemes, financed by privatising communal land, and hardly affordable to those previously living there.
It is also timely because the protagonists are ageing and ever less easily found. Knowledge about these estates and their context vanishes. Some, including Edward Hollamby, the head of Lambeth’s Architect’s Department at the time, have been interviewed by others, with recordings accessible through the Architects’ Lives Oral History Collection held by the British Library. (2) Other voices are silent forever, like that of Rosemary Stjernstedt (save for a short interview held by the Royal Institute of British Architects). Before joining Lambeth’s Architect’s Department, Stjernstedt worked on the London County Council’s (LCC) Alton East Estate. At Lambeth, she became group leader responsible amongst others for the Central Hill development. Both projects are of Scandinavian-type Modernism, which becomes clear when seen in contrast to examples of the more well known British New Brutalist Modernism that Camden Council built concurrently. Her contribution speaks through the high quality of Central Hill’s layout, its placement cunningly traversing the steep slope towards the north, the thought-out and sometimes interlocking individual dwelling layouts, the specific materiality and, in particular, the humanist scale and relationship to the landscape and trees, not breaking the treeline.
The exhibition title is derived from the 1973 RIBA ‘housing’ conference of the same title. (3) This conference was chaired by Bill Howell (of Howell, Killick, Partridge and Amis Architects and from 1973 chair of the Architecture Department at Cambridge University). Speakers included Barry Cullingworth (author of a government commissioned report compiled between 1967 and 1969 addressing challenges faced by local authorities managing council housing), Kenneth Campbell, then head of the Greater London Council’s (GLC’s) Department of Architecture’s housing section, as well as Lambeth’s Housing Manager Harry Simpson. A related article focusses on examples from Lambeth and Southwark and praises ‘new’ tendencies’ towards rehabilitation, citing Lambeth’s Kennington Lane and Clapham Manor projects.
Clapham Manor nursery as pictured in the AJ article about the 1973 RIBA Housing Conference
The last period of extensive public housing construction in the UK was bookended by the 1965 reorganisation of local government and the beginning of the neo-liberal counter-revolution in the late 1970s. The geographical focus is on London because the search for high density during that period was greatest there. Amongst the inner-London boroughs, Lambeth stands out because during this period Lambeth’s Department for Architecture and Planning, under the leadership of Ted Hollamby, was developing an extensive variety of solutions in its search for high density. The aim of this research is to contribute to understanding and learning from Lambeth’s exemplary history. Surprisingly, this has not previously been thoroughly researched despite ample press coverage of recent residents’ campaigns. (4)
The exhibition is organised into four sections, illustrating firstly the scale of the operations and introducing the borough’s then new Architecture Department, secondly the policy context and its interpretation, thirdly the aspiration for inclusiveness of all with a focus on the exemplary residential redevelopment Blenheim Gardens, and whilst the ambition was to serve all, a final section on the voices of those who the Department did not reach.
The Housing Drive
Lambeth’s public housing of the period was conceived in the spirit of the British welfare state. Given new scale and responsibilities under the London Government Act of 1963, the Council reset its Architect’s Department earlier than other boroughs to satisfy the newly constituted inner London Borough of Lambeth’s greater housing responsibilities, ‘closer to the people’. A new borough architect and a housing manager were appointed to work hand-in-hand. The new borough architect, Edward Hollamby, came from the much larger and soon to be reconstituted LCC where he had been project architect for the Brandon Estate in Southwark and later became responsible for housing south of the River Thames. Hollamby had a double qualification as an architect-planner. He gained his architectural qualification at the Hammersmith School of Arts and Crafts and the RIBA, and his planning qualification in an evening course under William Holford at the Bartlett.
Hollamby built his Lambeth team mirroring the LCC’s group system with many former colleagues from the LCC. (5) Extending the team to other disciplines was reminiscent of Ove Arup’s contemporary approach and fostered innovative solutions in construction. It also tied in with the early modernist concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk or ‘total work of art’. On the other hand, the different groups worked like individual offices creating greater variety so that many buildings don’t feel like council estates today. That some projects beyond the department’s capacity were given to private practices like Darbourne and Darke, for which the department only acted as the client further contributed to that variety. Lambeth worked within the framework of the 1943 County of London Plan. (6) The plan was applied in terms of densities, for example Central Hill at the southernmost corner of the borough was planned for 70 persons per acre, and Blenheim Gardens, an estate centrally located within the borough, was designed for 112 persons per acre. It also defined the concept of ‘neighbourhood units’ of a certain population size that included shops and welfare facilities like schools or access to green space within a certain short distance and traffic management, in Lambeth implemented through smaller interventions and often competing with land for dwellings.
‘London Borough of Lambeth office structure’, Official Architecture and Planning, March 1968
Lambeth attempted as much as possible to meet the urgency of the government’s housing drive of the 1960s. Under Hollamby’s and Simpson’s aegis, the council’s building programme grew manyfold. This section of the exhibition contains drawings of the entire borough, produced by Lambeth’s planning department. They give an idea of the scale of the operation with Brixton town centre at the heart. The latter is further illustrated by an early Brixton town centre model, drawings and perspectives of elements of the scheme, the Brixton Recreation Centre, and a public consultation leaflet of 1974. (7) The department reviewed earlier proposals and integrated a major traffic interchange point of the GLC’s ring motorway proposals with an extension of the shopping facilities in Brixton’s Electric Avenue as well as central cultural amenities together with residential towers similar to the concurrent proposals for the Barbican Estate.
Welfare state housing policies were mentioned multiple times during interviews as fostering good quality housing by defining room size and layout standards. Their application was linked to subsidies. In response to the recommendations of the Homes for Today and Tomorrow (Parker Morris) report of 1961, Lambeth developed new dwelling types. (8) The schemes were used at a number of infill sites. Many of these houses are privately owned today and well maintained. They look stunning and highlight what good maintenance can achieve, and the quality of the communal assets Lambeth had to give away when forced to abide by the Conservative Government’s Right to Buy legislation in 1982. (9)
Spaces in the Home, London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, loaned by Leslie Batchelor
Patio houses together with an old people’s dwelling were Lambeth’s first typical designs to follow the Parker Morris recommendations. In this exhibition, patio houses at Woodquest Avenue represent one of the applications. Interviewee Leslie Batchelor worked on the scheme in 1967 and described the constant use of guidance by the Ministry of Housing and Local Government (MHLG) and later the Department of the Environment, illustrated by the Space in the Home and later Spaces in the Home publications (found in the vitrine in the archives’ entrance hall) (10) From 1967 housing subsidies were linked to the application of Parker Morris standards and an ‘approved cost element’ measured by the ‘cost yardstick’ issued by the Ministry of Housing and Local Government (MHLG). (11) The cost yardstick was further linked to housing gain, the additional number of people housed on a residential site after development compared to before. It was cleverly applied by Lambeth’s architects as group leader Magda Borowiecka described the Dunbar and Dunelm scheme in West Norwood – the dense housing accessed from a comparatively small street resulted in more funds available per square metre for public open space and subsequently higher quality finishes and landscaping for these communal areas.
Another example is the large Blenheim Gardens development on Brixton Hill where individual layouts were made extremely efficient, interlinking four- and five-yard wide house parts (so that four-yard wide living rooms are next to the neighbour’s five-yard wide entrance and kitchen), achieving a very dense low-rise development. New and existing green space play an important role in giving character to the scheme and integrating the historic Brixton Windmill. Materials were selected to give specificity to the site and reference the surroundings; London stock brick, asbestos slates, very much in contrast to the heavy concrete facades of contemporary Brutalism.
Site plan Blenheim Gardens, 1967, loaned by Tony Butler
Lambeth’s architects were given great freedom and space to develop design and details. Group leaders kept the architects and assistants free of non-architectural tasks; George Finch and Don Estaugh were mentioned in this particular. Groups flourished and working climates were pleasant as can be seen from hand drawings, the example below produced on the occasion of a farewell event. Architects were given freedom to research and visited for example different sports facilities in advance of designing the Brixton Recreation Centre. Within the group each architect then drew a scheme following some given rules, e.g. the location of the swimming pool at an upper floor level. Finally, schemes were pinned up and the best elements of each scheme synthesised.
Card drawn by Peter Bartle of George Finch’s Group, 1970, loaned by Carole Crane
Lambeth’s own direct labour department not only maintained Lambeth’s existing housing stock but also competed with external contractors to construct the schemes. Eventually they were overwhelmed with the amount of maintenance due to large numbers of previously privately owned housing now purchased by the council and in bad condition, and even more so after having been handed over the GLC housing stock located in Lambeth, more than doubling the number of council dwellings, whilst at the same time working with reduced funds in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
From cradle to grave
Lambeth’s housing schemes were inclusive for all ages from ‘cradle to grave.’ New and existing ancillary accommodation was grouped or integrated with new buildings. There were nurseries, children’s homes, schools, doctors’ group practices, leisure facilities, old people’s luncheon clubs and old people’s homes. When working on Lambeth’s Leigham Court Road sheltered housing scheme, Kate Macintosh remembered briefing guidance by the GLC and looking at the earlier old people’s home project in Cheviot Road, designed by Rosemary Stjernstedt’s group. Council homes were intended for all, like the NHS, and unlike later policies that reduced public housing’s purpose to be for the poorest only, which paved the way for its stigmatisation.
Lambeth’s Director of Architecture and Planning wanted to build communities in a physically recognisable form. Different locations were each given specific materialities creating identity. Elements of vernacular residential architecture were included to provide individuality and variety in expression without the gravity of Brutalist Modernism but at a human scale, as for example the many types of pitched roofs or the dormers that create a sense of comfortable, homely interiors.
From clearance to conservation
Land for new construction was scarce and the inner London Borough of Lambeth had to look very hard at which buildings to replace. The 1967 housing survey, the first of the British housing surveys, required by the London Government Act of 1963, was a four per cent sample of Lambeth’s housing stock. (12) Lambeth redeveloped many sites but also successfully rehabilitated existing houses. In fact, the Brandon Estate project Hollamby had led when at the LCC was the first to include a rehabilitation element. Hollamby was well versed with the LCC’s policies of population dispersal, very much common practice at the time. Practices of ‘clearance’, i.e. displacing people, were carried out no matter whether to redevelop or rehabilitate. Not all existing residents acquiesced and some campaigned in particular against comprehensive development with slogans like ‘Save Lambeth from Hollamby’. Lambeth’s architects were aware of the debate about inner city densities and the opposition to clearance (explicitly stated by Elizabeth Denby) as identified by Hollamby himself in an article about a conference called by the Housing and Planning Committee of the Association of Building Technicians in 1957. (13)
Conditions in Lambeth’s lower quality houses were terrible, in particular with houses in multiple occupation where newcomers like Lambeth’s Windrush generation often ended up living. But Lambeth’s focus was not on the overcrowded slum conditions but rather on the less dense ‘twilight areas,’ that is, less densely populated areas not classified as slums yet but where a larger housing gain was possible and fewer people would be displaced. (14) These tended to be occupied by people of white working-class backgrounds. At the same time and due to Lambeth’s proximity to London’s centre, a younger more affluent population had started moving to Lambeth and buying and doing up some of these houses, the beginnings of what later came to be known as gentrification. Some of them had even bought their homes with a council mortgage. When such owner-occupiers received a compulsory purchase order (CPO) notice, they found ways to oppose and sometimes stop the borough’s plans. Evidence prepared for the Clapham Action Rectory Grove (CARG) Group for residents and squatters of Rectory Grove, as well the documents titled ‘Residents’ Case’ for those affected by the Bedford Road, Hetherington Road, Acre Lane CPO are examples that supported successful defence against compulsory purchase (which are shown in the vitrine in the exhibition foyer).
The shift of housing powers from the LCC to the local borough authority did not reach everyone. But rather than widening the communal remit and providing more participation for all, power was gradually taken away from local government. Central government had started to favour privatisation policies and increased support for improvements to homeowners. On the other hand Lambeth did inform central government policies through the Lambeth Inner Area Study carried out from December 1972 to summer 1976 by the Shankland Cox Partnership and the Institute of Community Studies for the Department of the Environment (DoE), jointly directed by Graeme Shankland and Peter Willmott. (15)
Railton Road Area Study
This part of the exhibition draws on Alan Piper’s final thesis in architecture, prepared in 1974-75 at the then Polytechnic of the South Bank, the successor of the LCC’s Brixton School of Building. From 1965-67, Alan had worked for Lambeth’s Architect’s Department as a trainee building technician in the maintenance and improvements group. In particular, his thesis includes an area analysis similar to that of Lambeth’s planners assessing a typical redevelopment area. Alan’s family were living in the area when the Mayall, Railton and Rattray Roads CPO was agreed by Lambeth Council in 1971. Residents began to contest this, forming the Railton People’s Planning Association which went on to campaign for refurbishment rather than demolition, and the launching of a Housing Action Area (HAA) to channel improvement grants into the neighbourhood. Alan Piper’s thesis explored the effects of various proportions of rebuilding and refurbishment, including use of a screen block to shield houses beyond from railway noise. The display also shows Lambeth’s initial plans to demonstrate that sufficient housing gain could be achieved to justify demolition. At the ensuing public inquiry, residents showed that similar numbers could be achieved more quickly and cheaply by refurbishment. Eventually a much smaller estate was built at the northern end of the original site, and by then the tide had turned in favour of area improvement. Increasing networking between residents’ groups in the area led to the formation of the Brixton Society.
Burgeoning people participation on the part of individuals and groups, including squatters and amenity societies contributed to a changing attitude towards comprehensive development and policies of dispersal, and bolstered the emerging conservation movement. Central government funding cuts partially due to a weakening economic climate in the 1970s, and a change of central government policy, eventually stopped public residential construction.
Christiane Felber, PhD candidate in Architectural and Urban History and Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, September 2025
(3) AJ Information Library ‘Homes for Tomorrow’ CI/SfB81, The Architects Journal 9 May 1973
(4) Examples are campaigns to save the Cressingham Gardens Estate and the Central Hill Estate from redevelopment in the 2010s. [An earlier Municipal Dreams post describes Cressingham Gardens and residents’ protests against ‘regeneration’.]
(5) London Borough of Lambeth Office Structure, Official Architecture and Planning, March 1968.
(6) Forshaw, J. H. & Abercrombie, P. (1943). County of London Plan. London: Macmillan.
(7) Exhibition leaflet ‘New heart for Lambeth. Brixton town centre’, 1974.
(8) Great Britain. Ministry of Housing and Local Government., & Parker Morris committee. (1961). Homes for today and tomorrow. Report of the Parker Morris committee.
(9) 1980 Housing Right to Buy Act.
(10) Department of the Environment (1968). Space in the home. Metric edition. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.
It’s claimed that Cologne built more social housing than any other German city in the 1920s. The city’s housing programme deserves study in own right therefore but it also provides a fascinating case study in the interwar evolution from an arts and crafts-inspired architecture to a more functionalist modernism. In Cologne, we see an explicit shift from the Gartenstadt to Neues Bauen – from the Garden City to a type of ‘New Building’ (sometimes termed New Objectivity) that emphasised simpler, plainer forms and modern materials. We’ll see this played out particularly in the career of the city’s leading architect, Wilhelm Riphahn.
Cologne had been an independent Free City until the French invasion of 1796, part of Prussia from 1815 and, from 1871, a city of the newly unified German Reich. In the nineteenth century, it grew exponentially as a commercial and industrial centre and railway hub; its population increased from around 42,000 at the beginning of the century to over 372,000 by its end and to almost 517,000 by 1914. This rapid urbanisation caused housing problems common to all European cities during the Industrial Revolution.
Konrad Adenauer, 1917
In the years leading up to the First World War, Cologne was governed by the Deutsche Zentrumspartei (the German Centre Party), a moderate Catholic political organisation; the city’s deputy mayor from 1909 was Konrad Adenauer. It was Adenauer who, in 1913, founded the Gemeinnützige Wohnungs-und Siedlungs-AG, a public limited non-profit housing and settlement company, generally known then and now as GAG. It was endowed with a share capital of around 1.22 million Reichsmarks (about £61,000 at the time), roughly half from private investors and half from the City of Cologne which controlled 52 percent of its shares. (1)
Bickendorf
In the year of its foundation, GAG organised an architectural competition to design a new eleven-hectare (27-acre), 600-home settlement in Cologne-Bickendorf. It was won by Caspar Grod, Lothar Kaminski and Wilhelm Riphahn with an entry titled (in dialect) ‘Lich, Luff un Bäumcher’ – light, air and trees.
It took its initial inspiration from Britain’s Garden City movement. Ebenezer Howard had published Garden Cities of To-Morrow in 1902; the German Garden City Society was founded the same year though with a more practical emphasis on smaller garden settlements. The more immediate inspiration for the winning entry was the model housing provided for the workforce of the Krupps factories in Essen.
Early photographs of Bickendorf; photographer Hugo Schmölz
Construction of a planned 575 single-family houses began in 1914. Each was provided an ornamental front garden; more practical allotment-style plots were located to the rear. The timing – as the First World War erupted- was inauspicious and just 80 homes had been completed by 1918. Riphahn was entrusted with the completion of the settlement after the war and by 1921 a total of 544 houses had been built along eleven, suitably bucolically named, thoroughfares.
Grüner Hof
The GAG’s next project and Riphahn’s next commission was Grüner Hof (Green Court), built between 1922 and 1923. As the name suggests, the scheme maintained the organisation’s emphasis on light, air and trees but it took as its model contemporary Dutch social housing and a favoured residential courtyard form that arrayed housing blocks around green open space. JJP Oud’s Tusschendijken scheme, 1920-23, in Rotterdam is cited as a particular influence.
In this, the Cologne estate anticipated Bruno Taut’s better-known Hufeisensiedlung (Horseshoe Estate) in Berlin, built between 1925 and 1927. In Cologne, the three courtyard spaces were interspersed between the estate’s four four-storey housing blocks in GAG’s first multi-storey development.
Oud is seen as an early exponent of the ‘New Building’ style; here in Cologne it can be recognised in the use of simple, often cubic, forms and new materials such as steel and concrete. In this respect, early modernism represented less a revolutionary break and more an evolution from existing forms. (3)
Bickendorf II/Rosenhofsiedlung
GAG’s next major scheme was a new estate built on the northern edge of the existing garden suburb of Bickendorf, sometimes known as the Bickendorf II, more often as Rosenhofsiedlung.
Early aerial view of Rosenhofsiedlung
This was a large estate of over 1100 homes, of eleven types, built along gently curving roads radiating from a central square. Riphahn was once more in charge of the overall development while the painter and sculptor Franz Wilhelm Seiwert provided a unifying colour scheme, a palette of yellows and whites. The first houses built, along Akazienweg, followed established styles but later building took on a more functionalist form.
Rosenhofsiedlung; photographer Hugo Schmölz
Social housing in Germany at this time, as in Britain, was disproportionately confined to the better-off working class who could pay its relatively higher rents regularly. Rosenhofsiedlung also had a significant number of lower middle-class and middle-class tenants, including artists, doctors and academics. Strict selection criteria applied and even into the 1980s prospective tenants were interviewed personally by GAG’s board of directors. (4)
This was an ambitious and innovative era in European social housing in which new ideas and models were widely shared. In 1925, Riphahn travelled with twelve colleagues to the Netherlands where they met Michel de Klerk and Piet Kramer and Willem Dudok, responsible for major schemes in Amsterdam and Hilversum respectively.
Blauer Hof
The influence of this visit might be seen in the layout of Blauer Hof (Blue Court), Riphahn’s next major work alongside his colleague Caspar Maria Grod, in its use of the courtyard arrangement typical of Dutch social housing. The local artist Heinrich Hoerle devised a colour scheme of coral red window frames on light grey facades.
Early aerial view of Blauer Hof
At the time, a swathe of lower-income homes had been cleared to build the Mülheim Bridge over the Rhine completed in 1929. To cope with the new pressure on housing from those displaced, GAG had acquired 18 hectares (around 45 acres) of land in Kalkerfeld to the south of Mülheim. The site was convenient to Buchforst railway station and was planned to cater for a poorer, less mobile population that lived and worked on the Rhine’s right bank.
Small apartments, averaging 50 m² (540 sq ft) were another means of building more cheaply for this lower-income population. Whilst each home had an inside toilet, only the larger ones also included a bathroom. The north-south disposition of some blocks and the loggias and balconies provided for each apartment were intended to maximise the light and fresh air enjoyed by residents.
As the contest between modernist architects and their traditionalist counterparts sharpened, the scheme witnessed its own version of the Dächerkrieg (Roof War) that erupted notoriously in Zehlendorf, Berlin, in 1928. (On one street, Am Fischtal, pitched roof houses were built in direct challenge to their modern, flat-roofed counterparts on the other side of the road.) In Buchforst, Riphahn’s fellow architect Otto Müller-Jena was found, in Riphahn’s absence, adding pitched roofs to some of the architectural drawings before being hastily redeployed to another project. (5)
The vanguard of modernist design, however, was seen in the Dammerstock scheme commissioned by the City of Karlsruhe in 1928. Karlsruhe invited Germany’s leading housing architects, including Riphahn, to compete for the role of master planner; their entries were assessed by a prestigious jury including, amongst others, such leading modernists as Ernst May and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
Dammerstock, 1929
In the event, Walter Gropius and Otto Haesler were awarded the commission and Riphahn came third. Gropius had resigned his leadership of the Bauhaus School that year but its terraced (or row) housing model had already been pioneered in Dessau-Törten. Riphahn, now explicitly a follower of the Modernist Movement, had proposed just such a scheme in his own submission and it was this form that Gropius applied at Dammerstock. The scheme also emphasised the north-south disposition of blocks maximising sunlight favoured by Modernism, a Zeilenbau arrangement in German.
Weisse Stadt
Riphahn’s enhanced prominence ensured his next commission (once more with Caspar Maria Grod) from GAG – the design in unashamedly modernist form of what became known as Weisse Stadt (White City) in the Buchforst district of Cologne, largely built between 1928-29.
Model of estate, axonometric view
The principal feature of the new estate was a range of five-storey terraced blocks of flats, interspersed among generous shared green open space and deployed diagonally from the area’s main thoroughfares, Heidelberger Strasse and Waldecker Strasse. The flats, at around 80 sq m (860 sq ft) were larger than those in Blauer Hof and all enjoyed large balconies; those on upper storeys benefitted from roof terraces. This was a scheme, as André Dumont’s study of the new residents has shown, that was designed for disproportionately middle-class and professional occupation.
This commitment to social mix was amplified in the estate’s next phase of development, streets of terraced housing with private gardens. In a deliberate corrective to sometime criticism of the monotonous form of contemporary terraced schemes, these were juxtaposed in a 45-degree rotation to the five-storey blocks.
A range of shops was provided along Heidelberger Strasse to serve the local community. It’s a telling symbol of the divided politics of the Weimar Republic that two consumer cooperatives vied for trade; Eintracht was a Christian-conservative society, the KG Hoffnung socialist. (6)
Beyond this, perhaps the visually outstanding feature of the estate is the Church of St Peter Canisius designed by Riphahn and Maria Grod in basilica form and in striking functionalist, modernist style and construction, completed in 1931.
A community centre including a restaurant, kindergarten, mothers’ advice centre and library was completed in 1932. This was destroyed in 1945 and not replaced. (The church, also heavily damaged in the war, was rebuilt in 1948.)
Divided politics and wartime destruction remind us that the Nazis came to power in 1933. Riphahn’s work was considered ‘undeutsch’ in the new totalitarian state and he was excluded from any public contract until 1938 when, due to the good offices of friends, he secured some commercial work and even, in suitably conservative form, some contracts for a GAG now led by Nazi placemen.
Riphahn came into his own again in the period of post-war reconstruction when he designed, amongst other schemes, the new French and British cultural institutes and, most notably, the new Cologne Opera House completed in 1957. He died, aged 74, in December1963. He deserves to be better known but his modest demeanour and practical focus ensured a relatively low profile even at the height of his success. As one contemporary noted, he was ‘the one who built the most and spoke the least’. (7)
Just two months before Riphahn’s death, Konrad Adenauer, who we met as a deputy mayor of Cologne and founder, in 1913, of GAG, had resigned as German Chancellor, a post he had held since 1949. Briefly imprisoned by the Nazi regime and suffering a form of inner exile during the war, Adenauer would play a key role in West Germany’s reconstruction and rehabilitation after it.
GAG survives. With some 600 employees and owning and managing around 45,000 properties of various types, it is the city’s largest landlord. The City of Cologne owns around 88 percent of its shares. In the city itself, there are some 40,000 social rent homes, down from over 100,000 in the 1990s. (8)
The quality and architectural significance of these interwar estates is now widely recognised and the well-maintained estates have been appropriately modernised. Blauer Hof, for example, was registered as an architectural monument in 1988 and completely renovated between 2006 and 2010. GAG itself provides excellent information on the architectural and social history of the estates both for residents and others who are interested. (This is something that councils and housing associations in the UK might usefully emulate).
Despite financial and political pressures common to the sector throughout Europe, social housing continues to be a dynamic, innovative and much needed force in modern Germany. We can nevertheless look back to the ground-breaking idealism of the 1920s as a Golden Age and a model to which we might aspire.
Sources
(1) Andreina Milan, ‘Wilhelm Riphahn in Cologne (1913–1963): Urban Policies and Social Housing between Innovation and Conservation’, Urban Planning, vol 4, no 3, 2019. Other detail is drawn from this source.
We left Rochdale in last week’s post contemplating the failure of its Ashfield Valley Estate, completed in 1968 and all but demolished by 1992. For the moment, let’s return to the heady days and high hopes of the later 1960s when council housing ambitions remained high and, as yet, unsullied.
Lower Falinge
As the Seven Sisters were completed, Rochdale Borough Council approved £1.8 million plans in November 1967 to build 750 flats in four-storey, deck-access flats in an area of Lower Falinge (pronounced Fay-linge) immediately to the north.
Lower Falinge, photographed in 2018
It’s necessary to record again the joy that these new flats brought to many of their first residents. Ann Doherty, aged 23 year with a three-year-old son, forced to leave a condemned two-up, two-down property, moved into a three-bedroom flat in the estate. Aged 72 and still resident on the estate, she recollected: (1)
It was heaven coming here. It felt brilliant because we didn’t have a bath in the old house or an inside toilet. Everything here was perfectly decorated. It was so lovely.
The estate, clad in composite panels (and looking grey on a grey day when I visited in April 2018), survived well enough for many years whilst all the time, subject to the stresses and strains that afflicted estates more generally as they aged and as their social and economic circumstances – and, of equal importance, popular and media perceptions – changed.
Lower Falinge, photographed in 2018
In October 2010, however, a bombshell hit – a sensationalist article in the Spectator headlined ‘Britain’s Welfare Ghettos’ (rehashed in the next day’s Daily Telegraph) declared it ‘England’s benefits capital’. It claimed 84 percent of its population were dependent on state benefits, 77 percent on out-of-work benefits alone. The ‘colour’ provided added to the prurient horror of the right-wing journal’s readership: the estate’s grocer informs customers that ‘milk tokens are accepted’; the other major retailer is a betting shop; a local cafe offers a £4.70 breakfast that includes a can of Stella. (The latter was a falsehood.) You get the picture. (2)
It described harsh realities, of course, and, broadly speaking, societal failure rather than personal failing. And there were complaints that the selective data included the residents of a local hostel whilst excluding an adjacent area of owner-occupied homes. But what counted was the label … which stuck.
David Cameron’s speech in January 2016 proclaiming a blitz on England’s worst 100 ‘sink estates’ led to a Guardian article referencing Government figures that ‘officially identified Falinge estate as the most deprived area in England – a mantle it had held for five consecutive years’. In 2013, 72 percent of residents were said to be unemployed; four out of five of its children growing up in poverty. (3)
Andy Littlewood, chair of the Lower Falinge tenants and residents’ association, later recounted the stigmatisation suffered by residents through such coverage, with many alleging that they had lost job opportunities as a result or been forced to lie about their home address.
Architect’s drawing of proposed changes
In June 2017, Rochdale Boroughwide Housing (RBH) announced simultaneous regeneration plans for College Bank and Lower Falinge – the demolition of four of the Seven Sister towers blocks as discussed in last week’s post and 244 flats in the latter’s four-storey blocks. Some 560 new homes were proposed in Lower Falinge. The plans as a whole proposed the loss of 720 primarily social rent homes and their replacement by 560 new homes of indeterminate tenure. (4)
A 2018 planning application provided more detail for Lower Falinge: 55 new homes (33 flats and 22 houses) and a new park and play space were to replace five existing blocks. Consultation – but no formal ballot of tenants’ views – revealed some in favour but a strong ‘Save Our Homes’ campaign emerged among many arguing that the proposals would see the loss of 128 social rent homes, including 64 three-bed and 64 one-bed, many with ground-floor access, as well as key community facilities, even as, campaigners pointed out, 22,000 languished on the local waiting list for social housing. (5)
Lower Falinge, photographed in 2018
In the end, it’s a common story. RBH claimed that the flats were dated and no longer fit for purpose yet problems of damp and condensation in the Pershore block, for example, have been successfully treated and it and some other blocks will remain. Yet again, a social landlord’s ‘vision’ confronts the interests of existing residents and their attachment to home.
There are good intentions. Rochdale’s 2021 planning statement for Lower Falinge is beguiling in its talk of ‘a better quality and mix’ of housing, better public space and better links with surrounding areas. It goes on to say that the ‘the delivery of market housing within this area is required to deliver this diversification and to ensure the sustainability of retained affordable housing in the area’ – a sentence containing the claim that a tenure mix of public and owner-occupied housing is a good in itself whilst also acknowledging contradictorily that affordable housing (how affordable?) is only possible by cross-subsidy from market sales. (6)
Lower Falinge new housing
As of 2025, six blocks are set to be demolished; Zedburgh remains as Andy Roche – another former chair of the estate’s tenants and residents’ association – refuses to budge. Whilst the residents of the new homes are quite understandably thrilled by their move, Andy’s words to a local journalist capture the sensitivities involved: (7)
The new builds change the nature of our area. I have nothing against the new flats, but the new flats are very small in comparison to the old ones. We were never against regeneration fully, but we didn’t trust RBH. This area is fondly looked on by some but not others … the former Prime Minister David Cameron called us a sink estate in 2016, which was a bit offensive. He meant we were the poor people that can’t go anywhere else.
Another Rochdale estate planned at around the same time as Lower Falinge was the Freehold Estate built around a mile south-west of the town centre. Recent events have given it an unenviable reputation.
The Freehold Estate
Freehold Estate, architect’s drawing
The estate comprises nineteen housing blocks and a three-storey car park arrayed around a series of service roads and green open spaces. The Borough’s 1971 Official Guide described its ‘414 dwellings, 4 shops, a public house, a Welfare Centre for elderly and handicapped persons … ‘. Its deck access walkways were a significant feature, constructed so people could walk from any point in the estate to another without returning to ground level. (8)
Freehold Estate, 2009
It was prosaic architecturally but far more serious complaints about its build quality emerged within one year of the first tenants moving in in 1971. The Rochdale Observer reported residents’ complaints about damp in the flats, ‘paper-thin’ interior walls, intimidating antisocial behaviour on decks – everything felt substandard; tenants ‘complained they felt like “guinea pigs” in the corporation’s “trial and error” experiment’.
Later complaints focussed on crime and antisocial behaviour and by 2000 the Council had agreed to install more security cameras and remove some walkways ‘currently used as rat runs by criminals’. Pitched roofs were added to the blocks.
The Estate became the focus of national attention in the aftermath of the tragic death of two-year old Awaab Ishak in December 2020. A coroner’s inquest concluded that he died of a severe respiratory condition resulting from prolonged exposure to mould in his home. The Housing Ombudsman’s Special Report on Rochdale Boroughwide Housing published in March 2023 was equally critical.
Awaab’s parents had first complained about damp and mould in 2017 but had found their complaints dismissed as did other tenants. A survey carried out by RHB after Awaab’s death found 80 percent of homes suffering damp and mould; 12 of the 380 properties surveyed were branded as Category 1 hazards under Health and Safety regulations)-. And yet when asked by the Ombudsman what it considered to be the main causes of damp and mould, RBH replied: (9)
Tenants’ lifestyle e.g. not heating the property adequately, insufficient use of ventilation provided, drying clothes and cooking in the home, not venting tumble dryers, ritual bathing.
Unsurprisingly, the Ombudsman’s conclusion was damning – and shaming:
Our investigation found that the root cause of service failure within Rochdale Boroughwide Housing was a propensity to dismiss residents and their concerns out of hand, with staff believing that they knew better and that the expectations of their residents were unreasonable … That attitude was then further exacerbated by a poor standard of customer service, when they did accept that action was required …
As someone who advocates for public housing, I find those words heartbreaking.
In response to a public campaign spearheaded by Awaab’s parents, ‘Awaab’s Law’ was passed in February 2025 requiring social landlords to investigate and fix damp and mould hazards within set timeframes, with emergency repairs addressed within 24 hours.
RBH was placed under Special Measures (removed in March 2025). The organisation says it has learnt lessons and necessary remediative action has taken place.
Freehold Estate, 2024
The Freehold Estate hasn’t quite escaped its unwanted notoriety. Crime, much of it drug-related, continued to plague the estate. In November 2024, Greater Manchester Police secured a three-month closure order that prohibited non-residents from congregating in stairwells, on landings, bridges and near bin chutes. Most residents of the estate welcomed the move whilst calling for stronger action to tackle the drug dealers directly. (10)
Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, just as Rochdale was implementing these classic policies of large-scale clearance and redevelopment in the later 1960s, the Council cooperated with a Government-commissioned study of Deeplish, a so-called ‘twilight’ district of poor, predominantly owner-occupied housing, one mile south of the town centre. (In fact, Rochdale was selected for its relatively good record in the reconditioning of older properties.)
The report recommended financial support for housing and environmental improvements on an area basis. The Council followed up with a £6000 pilot scheme to cover Pullman, Pike, Penrith and Pomona Streets. In this way, Rochdale prefigured and pioneered a general shift, legislated in the 1969 and 1974 Housing Acts, towards the rehabilitation of areas often previously condemned and cleared as slum housing. (11)
Well, Municipal Dreams are looking thin on the ground but let’s revisit and conclude this extended account of Rochdale’s council housing. Returning to the bigger picture, the County Borough of Rochdale had disappeared in a reform of local government in 1974 to become an enlarged Metropolitan Borough of Rochdale within Greater Manchester.
By the later 1970s, the new borough owned and managed around 21,500 homes on 82 estates. Of these, one-third had been built before 1939 and four-tenths between 1954 and 1964. Over a third of Rochdale’s council housing comprised three-bed houses and one-quarter two-bed houses. The numbers remind us that the vast majority of local council housing was not ‘modernist’ and did not suffer the alleged design problems of the multi-storey estates discussed in latter posts. (12)
Conversely, of course, council house tenants wherever they lived and in whatever form of housing did suffer the larger shifts affecting public housing in recent decades. A combination of well-meaning homelessness legislation (giving the right to a council home for those in ‘priority need’), Right to Buy allowing tenants to buy their homes and a near cessation of new build reducing council housing stock, and the sharp decline of employment in Britain’s traditional industries led to the residualisation of council housing. In other words, it became increasingly housing of and for our poorest citizens.
In 1984, the Borough Council reported its 21,000 tenants were ‘disproportionately unemployed/unskilled, single-parent families, elderly’. On the Kirkholt Estate – Rochdale’s flagship project of the 1950s and undeniably a step-up and decent housing for many thousands of its residents over many years – of its then 7000 population, 21 percent were unemployed and 12 percent were single-parents. Kirkholt became a Priority Estate within the Government’s regeneration programme of the time. (13)
Meanwhile both Conservative and New Labour governments were hostile (in varying degrees) to council housing (owned and managed by local authorities) as such. As noted earlier, Rochdale’s housing stock was transferred to Rochdale Boroughwide Housing, an arms-length management organisation (or ALMO) in 2002. Labour’s Decent Housing Standard enacted in 2000 required (rightly after years of cutbacks and neglect) massive investment in the public housing stock while public spending curbs restricted local authority borrowing. Housing associations could borrow as could ALMOs, created by the Labour Government as a ‘third way’ for councils reluctant to lose all control over their housing stock.
RBH, fittingly in the ‘Home of Cooperation’, became a mutual housing association in 2012 with a 13-strong board made up of six tenant members, four council members and three independent members. Sadly, that apparently progressive ethic has not shielded the organisation from the pressures and dynamics affecting the wider public housing sector and seemed to count for nothing in its treatment of Awaab Ishak.
RBH now owns and manages around 12,500 homes in the borough; there are almost 9000 on the local social housing waiting list. In 2023, around 200 families were living in temporary accommodation provided by the Borough.
Rochdale’s housing history reminds us of the huge contribution made by local government to providing decent and affordable housing to many millions over the years. That need and mission remain. But this account has amplified the first duty of social housing providers, that is to build well and manage effectively.
Although Rochdale had built on a large scale in the interwar period, as we saw in last week’s post, and although it had suffered little direct damage during the war itself, peacetime brought renewed challenge and increased expectation, reflecting both the persistence of slum housing in the town and popular demand for reform and reward.
A survey of 18,375 houses in the borough in 1949 revealed 1600 back-to-back properties and 500 still reliant on pail closets or privies. A second survey four years later recorded 4388 substandard homes. (1)
But before the slum clearance programme begun in the 1930s could be renewed, there was an immediate housing crisis met in part in Rochdale, as elsewhere, by the erection of temporary prefab bungalows. Twenty of 67 were declared complete by December 1945; the Prefab Museum map shows a few more dotted around the borough. (2)
This was at best a temporary fix – the bungalows themselves were expected to last ten years though many survived longer – and planning for permanent post-war housing on a large and improved scale had begun early. Just two days after D-Day, as war still raged in Europe, the press reported that Rochdale was leading a Housing Sites Group comprising nine local councils to prepare for post-war construction. (3)
In February 1945, a special Council meeting to discuss housing, armed with a recent Ministry of Health circular empowering local authorities to prepare newbuild sites, proposed to build 538 houses in the first year of peace. New estates in Greave and Newbold were in the advance planning stage and the layout of what would be the borough’s early flagship project in Kirkholt was agreed. (4)
The pace of planning and its place in popular consciousness are shown by the Housing Exhibition the Council organised in the Old Baths on Smith Street in March. The plans for Kirkholt were exhibited and, in a very rare example of public consultation, attendees were invited to express their preference between two types of house (the exhibition provided ground floor prototypes) – one with a small kitchen and separate dining room, the other – which we might think more ‘modern’ – containing a large kitchen-diner and separate utilities room. (5)
A BISF demonstration house at Northolt
Most feedback reportedly criticised the low ceiling height (just eight feet – an economising measure) of the proposed houses; a criticism endorsed by the Housing Committee in a letter to the Ministry of Health. The Committee, despite visiting the Ministry of Works’ demonstration site in Northolt, was also sceptical of permanent prefabricated housing but proceeded somewhat reluctantly with a proposed trial of some 50 to 60 such homes. (6) A larger number of BISF (British Iron and Steel Federation) houses – of steel-frame construction with a characteristic steel sheet cladding on the upper storey – built on Waithlands Road earned the area the typical nickname ‘Tin Town’.
It is the Kirkholt Estate, planned to house a population of 10,000, that captures the highest hopes of Rochdale’s councillors and best exemplifies post-war ideals. As Borough Surveyor WHG Mercer, observed: (7)
In the 1920s and 1930s, the housing estates were never larger than about 400 dwellings, and being on the fringe of existing developments, did not create communal problems … [But Kirkholt required] all the necessary provisions for day-to-day existence, namely schools for all ages, shops, public houses, churches, health clinic and a community centre.
This was the Neighbourhood Unit, championed by Patrick Abercrombie in his wartime plans for London and Plymouth, adopted in post-war official planning guidance, and exemplified by the London County Council’s Lansbury Estate built for the 1951 Festival of Britain.
German prisoners of war involved in the early layout of the Kirkholt Estate, 1945
61 and 63 Queen Victoria Street
The building of Kirkholt began in the summer of 1945 with German prisoners of war used to assist in the construction of roads and sewers. The first two houses completed (61 and 63 Queen Victoria Street) were occupied in July 1948; the first infant school in 1949; a junior school in 1952 and a secondary modern in 1956. The estate as a whole was completed in the late 1950s; the long-promised community centre and central parade of shops on The Strand were finally provided at around the same time. On completion, the estate housed almost one in twelve of Rochdale’s population. (8)
Early housing on the Kirkholt Estate, illustrated in the Borough’s 1952 Official Handbook @ Mike Ashworth
When you look at Kirkholt what you notice first of all is its layout – curving streets set among generous green space that hark back to the bucolic ideals of the earliest so-called cottage estates. Of those ‘cottages’, most are conventional, somewhat boxy, brick-built semi-detached houses although there were apparently some 15 or so housing types constructed and all ‘built in accordance with the recommendations of the Housing Manual of 1944, issued jointly by the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Works’ according to the Borough’s 1954 Official Handbook. Thirteen three-storey blocks of flats were built but these proved less popular with tenants and unpopular with window cleaners and coalmen. (9)
There was another significant shift noted by Mr Mercer:
when slum clearance began to operate in 1930 it became obvious that there must be a greater variety of dwellings on each estate and … a number of one-bedroomed and four-bedroomed dwellings were erected.
The one-bedroom properties were bungalows reserved to elderly residents; in the 1950s almost one in five of Rochdale’s new council homes was of this type compared to one in twenty-five before the war.
The Borough’s Development Plan, produced under the terms of the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act and approved by Government in 1953, provides a good overview of the Council’s strategic vision. Its first five years were committed to meeting current housing needs, primarily by completing the Kirkholt Estate; a second 15-year phase envisaged redevelopment and slum clearance and the relief of central congestion. It aimed, reflecting the ambitions and ideals of its time, to create:
12 neighbourhood units (including existing estates) interspersed with green belts of land and separated from industrial areas which will be grouped within defined zones.
Nook Housing Estate, an image from the Borough’s 1952 Official Handbook. The aerial view gives a powerful impression of the estate’s generous layout. @ Mike Ashworth
In simple numerical terms, Rochdale boasted 6688 council homes on 38 estates by mid-decade. At that point, Kirkholt (1855 homes) was by some way the largest; Brotherod (438), Turf Hill (424), Nook Farm (406) and Spotland (328) were next in order of size. (I’m aware that I probably throw out too many statistics – it’s just that they seem so telling when compared to the paltry numbers of genuine social rent homes being built today.)
And it’s maybe those numbers that allowed Rochdale’s mayor in 1966 to suggest: (10)
He did not think the Rochdale housing position was desperate. The actual number of people needing council houses, as opposed to those who simply desired them, was probably about two hundred and some on the list would be housed under clearance schemes.
He was defending the Council’s decision to build the ‘Seven Sisters’ – the nickname applied to the four 21-storey and three 17-storey point blocks that tower over Rochdale town centre. They were a significant departure in housing policy and were at the time one of the most innovative council housing schemes in the country.
College Bank
The Seven Sisters, photographed 1985. In the foreground, a statue of Rochdale son John Bright and the Touchstones Library and Museum. The image marks an artwork by Shirley Cameron, Monica Ross and Evelyn Silver, ‘Monument to Working Women’. Photograph Patsy Mullan.
The first plans for the College Bank scheme – to give it its official title – were unveiled in 1962 and the seven tower scheme – designed by Wimpey’s chief architect D Broadbent in conjunction with Borough Surveyor WHG Mercer – was officially approved the following year. They were built using no-fines concrete (that is concrete without fine aggregates or sand added to the mix) with posts and beams cast in situ. This was a form of non-traditional construction but here executed in sturdy and durable form.
Three show flats were presented to a viewing public on April 1965 and the first completed, 17-storey, block was opened by Richard Crossman, Labour’s Minister of Housing and Local Government, in October.
Ceramic murals, provided by lecturers at Rochdale College of Art adorned the entrance halls. All but one were removed (with tenant agreement) in 1995; that by George and Joan Stephenson in the Mitchell Hey tower remains. (11)
The western range of the Seven Sisters viewed from the Memorial Gardens, photographed 2018
The flats were intended to attract professional people to Rochdale; they were let to those who applied on a separate waiting and those, primarily, who could afford its higher rents. Bedsitters renting at £2 9s (£2.45p – around £43 a week in today’s terms) and one-bed flats at £3 15s (£66) and £4 2s (£72.25p) let quickly; two-bed flats at £5 2s (about twice the rent of an equivalent council home – £90 a week contemporarily) a little less so but all proved popular. (12)
New residents included Tony McCormick, an art student, and his wife, from Hemel Hempstead (‘readily accepted by Rochdale people’, they said) and, from 1970, Karen and Kevin Quinn; Karen worked in admin, Kevin was a primary school teacher. Robin Parker, a social worker, moved in in 1974. Karen Quinn remembers:
It was quite posh at the time. We were quite proud to bring people there. Our friends thought it was wonderful.
Five of the Seven Sisters seen from the Town Hall balcony – an apt encapsulation of the borough’s municipal ambition, an image from Rochdale’s 1971 Official Guide @ Mike Ashworth
Fast forward to the present, the Seven Sisters still stand – an impressive architectural statement in the heart of Rochdale and, to my mind, as powerful a testament to municipal endeavour and aspiration as the town’s nearby town hall. But much has changed. In the slow evolution that affected council housing more broadly, the flats became less desirable, even, in some eyes, a ‘sink estate’. In Robin Parker’s view, the Council started re-housing people in the blocks ‘not suitable for high-rise living’ – a typical occurrence when the most vulnerable on the waiting list and those with least choice are allocated to so-called ‘hard to let’ estates.
The eastern cluster, photographed 2018
In 2017, the tower’s new landlords, Rochdale Boroughwide Housing (RBH) – an arms-length management organisation created by the Metropolitan Borough Council in 2002, transformed into a mutual housing association in 2012 – declared their intention to demolish the four 21-storey blocks, claiming Mitchell Hey, Dunkirk Rise, Tentercroft and Town Mill Brow were too expensive to refurbish. They would be replaced by 120 low-rise homes.
Established residents such as Audrey Middlehurst, a retired teacher who had lived in Mitchell Hey for 29 years, and Robin Parker, by now a former Labour councillor and erstwhile mayor of Rochdale, led a tenacious campaign to preserve their homes. It’s been a tortuous story (Robin Parker died, aged 78, in 2019; Audrey Middlehurst, aged 89, still lives in her College Bank flat) since then. It seemed the campaigners’ pleas had finally been met in March 2024 when RBH announced a deal with Legal & General that would fund renovation of the blocks. That deal collapsed in October 2024 and, as of now, the fate of the blocks remains uncertain. Residents’ lives, blighted by years of uncertainty, remain in limbo. (13)
For all their checkered history, the Seven Sisters remain. Another innovative but very different Rochdale scheme of the 1960s has been almost entirely demolished.
The Ashfield Valley Estate was approved by the Council in 1966 and completed in 1968. It comprised 1014 flats in 26 deck-access slab blocks named in alphabetical order from Appleby to Zennor. (‘X’ was represented by Exton in case you were wondering.) It was built by Cruden Construction using the Skarne system – an industrialised building system developed in Sweden using precast concrete panels, some including built-in wiring and windows, assembled on-site.
The Council made much of the ‘linked walkways throughout the whole system, thereby ensuring maximum segregation of vehicular and pedestrian traffic’ and pointed to the provision of ‘adequate shopping facilities’ and children’s play areas ‘including a shallow pool constructed by reducing the depth of the Rochdale Canal for a length of some 600 yards’. (14)
Early residents such as Christian Wilkinson seemed happy with their new homes: (15)
In our old house on Merefield Street the kitchen was not big enough to swing a cat round. But my kitchen now is marvellous and the central heating is quite cheap. We never hear any rows or anybody moving about in the flats above or below us.
Ena Lindley said she like the decks – ‘I couldn’t do with corridors like the town centre flats’.
But, if there was a honeymoon period, it was very brief. By the mid-1970s, residents were complaining about an epidemic of vandalism, crime and antisocial behaviour. The estate’s caretaker, George Cartshore, quit in 1978:
More and more people are moving out of the Valley. More and more flats are standing empty and despite the best efforts of caretakers some blocks have deteriorated into an appalling and dangerous condition. Ashfield Valley will be a ghost town in five to ten years.
New residents were typically more vulnerable or more desperate, often housed under homelessness legislation and with least choice as to where they lived. As one long-term resident observed caustically:
This place is a dumping ground for has-beens and never-will-be’s. There are a lot of good people on this estate but we’re treated like a leper colony.
When Anne Power investigated ‘unpopular council housing estates’ in the early 1980s she noted how early blocks let well but by the time the Council reached Z, half the offers were turned down. By then, only 19 of the original tenants were still living on the estate and around a third of all tenants left each year Conversely, ‘it was said single male migrants from Donegal headed straight for the Valley having heard of the empty flats’. (16)
In 1983, a £3 million regeneration programme was completed that removed 37 decks and improved services, entrance facilities and landscaping but Ashfield Valley’s die was cast. It remained a tainted estate, avoided by would-be tenants and blacklisted by many local traders.
The availability – by official and unofficial means – of cheap accommodation did, however prove attractive to younger people and, like the Hulme Crescents, the estate became home to a thriving counterculture of bands, zines and informal artwork. Trevor Hoyle’s 1975 cult novel, Rule of the Night, is based on the estate. Simon Armitage’s poem, Xanadu, recalls his experiences as a probation officer working on the estate. (17)
Ashfield Valley sometime in the 1980s, unknown photographer
The final nail in the coffin of Ashfield Valley was the flooding of 15 of the 26 blocks in January 1987 as pipes thawed after a heavy freeze. After that, with some blocks already emptied and with no prospect of viable investment in the estate, demolition came to seem the only answer. Five blocks were razed in 1989; by August 1992, just three remained and these thoroughly renovated and rebranded as Stoneyvale Court. Sandbrook Park – home to an Odeon, Pizza Hut and MacDonalds and, with a lingering nod to an alternative heritage, the headquarters of the Co-operative Pharmacy – has taken its place.
Rochdale’s 1971 Official Guide poignantly described Ashfield Valley as ‘a triumph for contemporary planning and modern building techniques’ but, in 2025, it’s hard to see the scheme as anything other than an unalloyed failure, almost from inception. We should nevertheless avoid that ‘wisdom’ that comes with hindsight as we look at two other troubled estates that culminated Rochdale’s council housing efforts in the late 1960s and 1970s. We’ll examine Lower Falinge and the Freehold Estate and conclude this story in next week’s post.
Thanks
Especial thanks to Mike Ashworth for sharing some images and pages from his Flickr site, a wonderful archive of diverse historical records, too varied to list but well worth your time.
Sources
(1) Rebe P Taylor, Rochdale Retrospect (Corporation of Rochdale,1956)
(2) ‘Rochdale Town Council’, Rochdale Observer, 8 December 1945 and Prefab Museum map
(3) ‘Rochdale Town Council’, Rochdale Observer, 8 July 1944
(4) ‘Rochdale Town Council’, Rochdale Observer, 10 February 1945
(5) ‘Rochdale’s Houses’, Daily Dispatch, 23 March 1945. The exhibition was officially opened by Hartley Shawcross, then Regional Housing Commissioner, who would be elected Labour MP for St Helens in July 1945 and as Attorney General led the British prosecution team at the Nuremberg trials.
(6) ‘Current Topics’, Rochdale Observer, 6 June 1945
(7) Quoted in Taylor, Rochdale Retrospect
(8) Oldham Rochdale HMR Pathfinder Heritage Assessment, Kirkholt Final Report, March 2008
(9) This and the succeeding quotation are drawn fromTaylor, Rochdale Retrospect’
(10) ‘Housing Experiment in a Town’s Centre’, The Guardian, 3 October 1966. The mayor in question was Alderman Cyril Smith. Smith had been appointed mayor as a Labour member but resigned from the party in August 1966 in a protest against rent increases agreed by the Labour majority. (Labour lost its council majority as a result.) Smith was elected Liberal MP for Rochdale in 1970. Well-founded allegations of personal and political wrongdoing tarnished his later years.
(16) Anne Elizabeth Power, The Development of Unpopular Council Housing Estates and Attempted Remedies, 1895-1984, London School of Economics PhD, July 1985
Municipal Dreams 