Many people across the country were aghast at English Heritage's proposal that a number of council estates, including examples of tower blocks, be preserved for posterity.
The announcement coincided with the start of demolition of the hated 1960s built Chalk Hill estate in Brent, north London, and preceded by days the blowing up of the last of the tower blocks at the similar vintage Trowbridge estate in Hackney. Both events were greeted with jubilation by their former residents. No wonder. These estates and every major city and town has them were once hailed as a significant contribution to the country's housing needs. Today a very large number are little better than the slums they replaced cockroach infested fire traps whose residents long to be offered a chance to get out.
But not every postwar council estate and tower block is a modern slum. On the contrary, well designed and well built from good materials, they have survived to continue providing relatively decent housing for working people a point testified to by the residents of some of the estates listed.
More than that they have survived to symbolise a period of postwar architectural and artistic history which is only just beginning to be recognised for the advances it made. In this sense, English Heritage's selection, though limited and open to argument, is to be welcomed.
The first postwar estates were a massive advance on the housing conditions which the majority of working class people had known. They had separate bathrooms, while a survey in 1937 found only 7 percent of working class homes in north London had such a thing. The 1951 census found 5 million people across the country were still dependent on public washrooms for baths.
Many of the new estates and tower blocks had central heating again, something unheard of until then. They were spacious, in fact 37 percent more spacious than the prewar low cost housing standards. They were clean and airy and, for those in tower blocks, above the peasoupers the foul smog which every winter smothered, sometimes for days, every major city, and particularly London. No wonder people living on the lower floors pleaded to be moved higher.
Their development brought together a generation of young architects and engineers who were excited by the prospect of building for the needs of ordinary people. These people were part of a major movement in art and design which looked to harnessing new ideas in technology and science to build a new Britain, one which would forever turn its back on the horror of the depression, and which would treat its workers with respect.
Together they faced a huge challenge. Around 4 million homes had been destroyed during the war some 35 percent of the housing stock. And many that had survived were slums. The 1945 Labour government launched a massive housing programme, and issued new housing and town planning standards.
At first most local councils proceeded with the development of large housing estates. But some, particularly the London County Council, brought together teams of architects, engineers and town planners and commissioned leading architects to head them. Competitions were also held to find the best and most imaginative schemes for estates. Some of the estates which these teams designed are among the proposed listing.
Many, such as Erno Goldfinger's Trellick Tower in Kensington, were based on ideas first pioneered by the Swiss architect Le Corbusier blocks of flats and maisonettes built on columns which also contained shops, nurseries, community centres, doctors' surgeries and, in some instances, roof gardens. Other estates, such as Powell and Moya's Churchill Gardens in Pimlico, boasted of being small towns in the middle of the city containing all the residents' domestic needs. This estate also included the first district heating scheme in Britain, using waste water from Battersea Power Station, which faced the estate on the other side of the Thames. Other estates, such as the LCC's Alton Estate in Roehampton, followed Le Corbusier's ideas to the letter, setting blocks amid landscaped parkland.
All of these estates were designed for a mix of people not just nuclear families. Some pioneered special facilities for pensioners, and some even began to look towards the needs of single people. Many of the homes on Churchill Gardens were earmarked for people such as nurses, janitors, railway and postal workers who needed to work in the area. But the money for the more grandiose schemes quickly began to run out. Within three years of winning its 1945 landslide victory, Labour brought in the first austerity measures and cut back on housing standards.
Still faced with the need to build homes 145,680 council homes were built each year between 1952 and 1976 councils were forced to look to cheaper measures, or continue leaving hundreds of thousands in the mostly substandard prefabs which by now littered the country. By now, however, the major building companies had begun to get their act together. And by the late 1950s they had found a relatively cheap, and highly profitable, way to build estates and tower blocks that had at least some resemblance to the LCC's showpiece estates system building.
The period of corrupt collusion between contractors and local councils which now followed was well captured in the recent television drama series, Our Friends in the North. One council after another was half bamboozled and half bribed into buying prefabricated tower blocks and low rise housing which hardly anyone knew how to put together. The shoddy materials and building practices of these years resulted in the gas explosion at Ronan Point in east London in 1968, killing five people an event which effectively brought to an end the era of tower block little noise, air and sunlight. The Barbican, in the City of London, is a classic example, and so are the high rise apartment blocks that litter every major US city. Trafalgar House, the backer of Sir Norman Foster's proposed Millennium Tower in the City of London, is sure it will be able to sell, for huge sums of money, the tower's top floor apartment blocks.
There is no fundamental reason why people should not live high up. The original ideas of Le Corbusier and other prewar architects were for apartment blocks set in parkland and containing all the facilities that people and their families would need nurseries, schools, shops, community and health centres, swimming pools and pubs.
The vast majority of working class estates built in the 1950s, 60s and 70s were a travesty of that idea, and even those that did strive to meet at least some of the ideals were undermined by local authority cuts in maintenance and repairs. For such places are relatively expensive to maintain, and it is this that has doomed even some of the better built tower blocks of the 1950s and 60s.
But they were also doomed by the prevailing ideas of the majority of those who designed them. For most agreed with their hero, Le Corbusier, who in his early years in the 1920s and soon after the attempted revolutions that swept much of Europe at the end of the First World War argued that architecture, by providing decent living conditions for working people, could prevent revolutions ever happening.
They were reformists with a vision which, in the 1940s and early 50s, really did look as if it was achievable. And this resulted in some of them, and the social engineers of the day who backed them, believing that everyone should live in Le Corbusier style tower blocks. So determined were they that this should happen, that they were prepared to first compromise with the lack of resources made available to build their schemes, and then sanction the construction of shoddy, badly built estates which, as was said at the time, `they should be made to live in themselves'.
Many tower blocks are well past their sell by date and should be knocked down. But we should not demolish them all and replace them with doric columned town houses, merry England villages and `conventional' houses, particularly when such houses are so small that the former tower block residents protest about being moved into them, as they have at Hackney's half demolished Holly Street estate.
The issue of resources is the crux of the problem which underlies the whole issue of working class housing be it in tower blocks, Barrett style rabbit hutches, `streets in the sky', or low level estates. Until we have built a world where people rather than profits come first, the materials used will nearly always be second rate, the construction will nearly always be shoddy and the profiteering by the major construction companies always enormous.