Jonathan Morrison
There are ways to build homes that people want to live in
Now is the moment, after the Grenfell Tower disaster, to ask hard questions of our architects about the housing we want
It took a disaster to turn public opinion against tower blocks the first time around. At a quarter to six on the morning of May 16, 1968, Ivy Hodge, a resident in Ronan Point in east London, went into her kitchen to make a cup of tea. When she lit her stove, it sparked a gas explosion that blew out the walls and caused a partial collapse of the building, killing four people and injuring 17. Ms Hodge survived but the country’s faith in high-rises had been irrevocably damaged.
It was, of course, never supposed to end that way. Architects had turned to towers for the noblest of reasons: influenced by Le Corbusier, the French modernist, and his seminal Cité radieuse in Marseilles, a generation signed up to the notion that they could create a utopia out of concrete. The need was pressing: councils had to clear slum areas and the Luftwaffe had destroyed nearly four million homes.
In 1951, the first residential tower block in the UK, optimistically called “The Lawn”, was built in Harlow in Essex and proved popular: the lavatories were indoors, the rooms were spacious and the views were unprecedented. By the mid-Sixties, a quarter of all new housing was high-rise. In total, some 6,500 tower blocks were built, of which about 4,000 remain in use.
The passion for concrete — named Brutalism in the UK after the term “béton brut”, or “raw concrete” — reached its high point, quite literally, with the work of Erno Goldfinger, who began the construction of Trellick Tower in west London in 1968. But by the time it was completed in 1972, the tide had turned. The 31-storey Trellick, lacking a concierge, became a byword for the lawlessness that plagued other high-rises: lifts, staircases and corridors became no-go areas, while drug dealing, prostitution and muggings were common. In the words of Barnabas Calder, the architectural historian, Brutalism had come “to be seen as the architectural style of the welfare state — a cheap way of building quickly”.
It was against that background that Grenfell Tower was finished in 1974. The building regulations had been tightened after Ronan Point — it is a testament to the strength of its concrete core that it remains standing after the catastrophic blaze — but Grenfell also fell victim to crime and anti-social behaviour: by the mid-1980s, it was seen as one of the most dangerous parts of Notting Hill at carnival time. The tower block, it seemed, had had its day, and builders and architects shied away.
In recent years, though, with a shortage of housing and an influx of foreign money, the towers have started to rise again. There are now more than 430 buildings over 20 storeys in height heading for the capital (with another 18 in Manchester), while 30 per cent of all new homes under construction in London will be in tall buildings, creating a total of 19,440 apartments. It should be possible to make them very safe to live in. But once safety has been addressed, we should be asking whether this is really how people want to live.
Nowhere is the disjunction between what people want and what is being designed for them so great as in the field of residential property. Typical of the new crop of ugly towers is the Lincoln Plaza building on the Isle of Dogs, east London, which was last year’s winner of the Carbuncle Cup, awarded annually by Building Design magazine to Britain’s worst building. It represents a new urban vernacular: mediocre at best, ugly at worst. This is the sort of pseudo-accomplishment that we will leave to future generations. “We have developed a type,” Robert Adam, the Royal Academician and architect, says. “And it’s pretty stark. It’s very much driven by fashion and a tight budget and is going up everywhere with minor variations.”
Part of the problem is that local authorities have discovered how much money they can make from tall buildings: according to Savills, the estate agent, they developed £1.2 billion worth of property in 2016, effectively betting on their ability to borrow at lower rates than the private sector and invest in premises yielding 6 to 8 per cent. “A lot of unsophisticated boroughs are just discovering the thrill of towers now, and using them as a way to make money,” says Barbara Weiss, the architect who founded the Skyline campaign against badly designed tall buildings. “A huge number of these schemes are very, very bad.”
And of course, similar blocks by private developers are sold wholesale to people who will never live in them, and therefore don’t care what they look like. Billions of pounds of “crisis capital” — money fleeing the instability caused by corruption — can generate a quick return for those who speculate with the skyline.
At the other end of the market, and priced out of these new developments except as drifting tenants, the native population is happy to buy anything that’s going: micro-flats, where disused offices are turned into rabbit hutches for first-time buyers and, outside the cities, acres of identikit, mass-produced boxes, widely denigrated for being soulless and, on average, 80 per cent smaller than those in Germany. The problems with poorly built new houses of that ilk — attacked by Kirstie Allsopp, the TV presenter, for their “shoddy” construction recently — have been widely covered in these pages, and even the Conservative manifesto felt it necessary to vow to tackle “substandard developments, some only a few years old”.
Yet we need the homes. Any homes. The 2017 housing white paper revealed that 160,000 new homes are built on average each year in England. We need between 225,000 and 275,000 a year just to keep up with population growth. This means that it’s a seller’s market and any rubbish will sell.
So what can be done? We can dispense with most of the off-the-wall solutions: floating houses on canals, blobs built on top of hospitals and libraries, even swallowing the great green belts piecemeal, although they are often not that green in places. There are plenty of niches in our cities for the sort of one-off infill residences that are a feature of Japanese cities but there are plenty of brownfield sites for bigger schemes too.
There is, of course, a strong case for the reform of planning and building regulations (not just part B, the bit that deals with fire safety) as half-hearted amendments by successive governments have left them contorted and muddled. This puts off smaller, local builders with an attachment to their communities: exactly the people who built so much of Victorian Britain, usually to a high standard. Clarity — with a presumption that if the rules are met, planning permission would be granted — would speed up the process of building and help smaller firms to undertake artisanal ventures.
Brutalism reached its literal high point in Britain in 1972 when Erno Goldfinger saw his Trellick Tower completed (EYEVINE)
By way of illustration, and based on one of his own schemes, Adam estimates that it will take seven and a half years, or the best part of an entire economic cycle, to complete and sell 10 per cent of a 4,000-home development — part of the reason that only the biggest firms are prepared to invest in such projects and why, consequently, there is such a dearth of choice. Two years are spent in planning alone, another year passes in dealing with legal issues, and, by the end of this period, Adam estimates his firm will have delivered three truckloads of information to a local planning committee. “We need root and branch reform,” he concludes.
Which brings us on to the planning committees themselves. These are staffed by the very people who should care most about their areas: local people. We need to support them in making the right choices, and remove them if they don’t. The built environment is too important an influence on our lives to be left to apathy.
Adam, who specialises in modern takes on historic forms, would like to see councillors given more choice: more than one proposal for each significant location, perhaps the option of more than one style as well. “You’ll never not have bad schemes,” he says, “but we should be aspiring to a higher standard of mediocrity.” This perhaps is what the Victorians did far better than us: insist that even their worst buildings met certain standards of taste and quality.
Encouragingly, there are signs that developers are beginning to appreciate that quality brings additional rewards. After all, we know what makes a good place: greenery, community, adaptability, prosperity; and above all, good transport links. Enlightened developers such as Argent in King’s Cross understand that incorporating these elements helps protect the value of their land, just as the great aristocratic estates of London — Grosvenor or Cadogan, say — generally accept that careful development is in their best interests.
Peabody — a pre-eminent housing association, the establishment of which was first announced in a letter to The Times in 1862 — is showing what can be achieved, at least in the capital. It is leading a £1.5 billion redevelopment of Thamesmead, perhaps best known as the dystopian set for A Clockwork Orange, and plans to create up to 20,000 new homes in an area that was once a dumping ground for problem families. It might not have been possible without the arrival of Crossrail in Abbey Wood next door, but the amount of attention being paid to enhancing employment, social and leisure opportunities is cheering. Stephen Howlett, the outgoing chief executive, says bluntly that “good architecture costs the same as bad architecture” and he has an impressive track record of commissioning exceptional buildings: another development, Darbishire Place in Whitechapel, east London, has large balconies and windows overlooking a public courtyard; living there was described by one resident as “like winning the lottery”.
The firm Peabody has picked for the Thamesmead masterplan, Proctor & Matthews, has an enviable record of creating new places that people actually want to live in. It has won plaudits, in particular, for its Abode scheme at Great Kneighton, outside Cambridge. What sets this project apart from the typical “volume housing” commuter estate is the sheer range of properties included. From the Cambridge side, terraces and apartments shade into mews homes, then spaced-out detached houses, as the development “erodes” into the countryside, while a palette of brick and dark wood provides unity and character. It has already become an elegant new community and will ultimately provide 2,300 new homes, 40 per cent of them affordable (meaning they’re within reach of families on average salaries), alongside schools, healthcare facilities, shops and transport.
Dispiritingly, in a recent interview with The Times, Amanda Levete, the world’s foremost female designer, claimed that only 10 per cent of architects are any good — yet Proctor & Matthews is hardly alone. St Chad’s in Thurrock, by Bell Phillips, is about as far from the traditional idea of council housing as it is possible to get, with its private gardens, wide avenues and carefully considered vistas of the Port of Tilbury. And this was accomplished despite the fact that a lorry park on the site would have proved more valuable.
Meanwhile, Mikhail Riches is engaged in building an innovative and dense eco-settlement of 105 ultra-low energy houses on the edge of Norwich which will recreate an almost 19th-century streetscape of brick terraces, drawing heavily on the local character and regenerating an area heavily scarred by substandard 20th-century planning. Similarly, Dujardin Mews in north London, by Karakusevic Carson, provides a modern take on the traditional terrace and represents the first new social housing to be built in Enfield for 40 years. It will help replace the “streets in the sky” beloved of modernists with mere streets, proving, once and for all, one hopes, that simple is usually best when it comes to housing.
Up and down the country, firms are applying their problem-crunching abilities to small but skilful schemes, usually of a few hundred houses. A drop in the ocean? Perhaps. But we need this sort of worthy, human-sized architecture more than ever: we also need to demand it. In many ways, we get the architecture we deserve. If we have an easy tolerance of foreign money, if we don’t concern ourselves with the struggles of younger or older generations, if we see property just as a place to park money or stack the poor, then we must continue in the same vein. Mediocre piled on sloppy — if we’re lucky. But it is not consequence-free: bleak and cramped spaces have a lasting and limiting effect, on families and children especially. And sometimes bad housing kills.
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