council estates.........

[Dangermouse]

Always wanted to live on the top floor of a high building.........none of those appeal to me, especially the third pic, I wouldn't dare go out, and I live in Scunny

 

[vernon]

Trellick tower looks amazing. Not sure I'd wanna live there though. Council houses/estates were ace when I was growing up. Loads of places to ride your skateboard/bike and so forth, and also the gardens were massive! I was a bit jealous to be honest....

When I was a kid I thought that living in a council house was the pinnacle of achievement. I marvelled at their huge gardens and the communal tunnel between the two semis that gave access to the back gardens in the council estate that my uncle lived in in Billingham. The houses were palatial in the space that they offered compared to the terraced house with the kitchen range, outside lav, and gas lighting that I was raised in. My wife is convinced that I am a lot older than I admit to when I describe my childhood home environment.

 

[Beebo]

There are two big brutalist 1960's estates near me.
The Ferrier Estate in Kidbrooke, now mostly demolished and redeveloped into Kidbrooke Village, like adding village at the end will help it!
The other one is the Thamesmead Estate, the setting for Clockwork Orange, still standing but i wouldnt want to spend too much time there.
On the other hand, the village where i grew up has a lovely low rise council estate, 3 bed houses regularly sell for over £400k.

 

[Linford]

This is how the social engineers sold it to me as a 4 year old



I used to think it would be so cool to live on the top floor of a tower block...but then again I was 4 at the time....

 

[ayceejay]

As a cure for slum dwelling and the squalor and community that had developed over several hundred years it seemed like a good idea to move the people out to Crawley or to stack them up in high risers forgetting in the process that they WERE people.

 

[deptfordmarmoset]

There are two big brutalist 1960's estates near me.
The Ferrier Estate in Kidbrooke, now mostly demolished and redeveloped into Kidbrooke Village, like adding village at the end will help it!
The other one is the Thamesmead Estate, the setting for Clockwork Orange, still standing but i wouldnt want to spend too much time there.
On the other hand, the village where i grew up has a lovely low rise council estate, 3 bed houses regularly sell for over £400k.

The Ferrier is nearly all down now. Talking of these villages, we've got a rebuilt and gated version of what are essentially halls of residence and someone convinced themselves that calling it a Student Campus Village made all the difference. When all they've done is reinvent the box.

 

[Mad Doug Biker]

Why do councils always seem to make 'big statements' or go for some bizarre street layout when it comes to providing housing.
What's wrong with conventional housing with a conventional layout? Is it just building down to a price or what ?

They are all trying to reinvent the wheel for the zillionth time in the hope that they get some sort of award, which will bring them to the attention of the aforementioned middle class papers, which will then laud their creation with nobberesque buzzwords like 'Iconic', 'innovative' and 'Unique', whilst they swan back off to their home in the country or whatever, without ever actually considering what it must be like to live in the new monstrosity they have just unleashed on an unsuspecting public.

Innit?

 

[Pale Rider]

Friend of mine lived high up in a tower block near Finsbury Park, north London.

NIce, spacious flat, but dreadful problems with cockroaches.

I remember the poor lad getting very downhearted when one appeared inside the clockface on the cooker.

 

[Sandra6]

You are the first person I have ever heard comment of such an idea.

I was responding to a remark made by Danbo about the gardens being massive.

 

[AndyRM]

Byker Wall?! That can f£ck right off.

Like many decisions taken in Newcastle, it ripped the heart out of a community.

There was a documentary/film made about the effect the Wall had made a couple years ago. I rarely get a bit of grit or dust in my eye when watching something, but that nailed me.

 

[Archie_tect]

I am struggling with the idea of getting misty eyed over the filthy stairwells which reek of a mixture of pee and disinfectant in these concrete towers.
High rise living in social housing created as many problems as it solved...it is a failed experiment, and the shift away from this mindset is a bit of a race now by idealistic architects who designed stacked concrete boxes to cram as many families into a small footprint and now acknowledged as poorly thought out social meddling by egotistical people who thought they knew best.
Testament to this is the fact that Architects never design their own homes with this brief....

I could argue differently but, in the case of the concrete Corbusian imitations, which should never have been built in London and Sheffield, it's a fair point!

Park Hill [Sheffield], Trellick Tower, Quarry Hill [Leeds], and to some extent Byker Wall all suffered from the same problems... in that tenants don't have any sense of ownership [not in the financial sense but from pride in their responsibility for, care of, and upkeep of a place]... similar 'experiments' when given over to the private ownership are incredibly popular and well maintained... look at the converted section of Park Hill now.... shows what can happen when people care for where they live. This isn't a comment on council tenants but concern about personal space, the peer pressure of teenage gangs, the threat of violence and the loss of neighbourhood communities where people are threatened by loneliness and separation.

 

[MarkF]

As a baby I was moved into a 1960's new build bungalow by aspirational parents. There were 2 council estates near me and that is where I spent most of my time, more kids lived there. One was south of my home and had a quite a few new Jamaican families, it was an extremely pleasant and well kept estate. 40 years later, whenever I bump into an old resident, it sparks of a long & happy conversation, it really was like being in family of 100's. Today, it's the same, a well kept pleasant place to live.

On the North, just 1mile away was a bigger estate. No high rise. It was deliberately sited amid rolling fields, to get kids out of the very polluted city centre, kids had woods, a river and a canal all on their doorstep, it was a picturesque setting. Authorities from all over Europe came to view it. By the early 70's when I ventured into it, it was a dump, problem families were moved there (it has space it's was one of the largest projects in Europe), today it's worse, it is 100% white and it's residents are as insular as a Mirpuri inner city slum, I wouldn't go in after dark for good money. These are big houses with big gardens situated in a lovely setting. It's people.

 

[shouldbeinbed]

Trellick Tower was a real sh!thole when I lived in its shadow in the early 1980s, and a friend of mine got murdered in the Byker Wall, In his flat. They look nice in middle class newspapers though, and it helps bump the prices up and hoik out the people they were meant to be made for.

Yes, every time I see the Byker Wall on my trips back up to the family, it looks nicer and more gentrified than the interesting looking profile but grim close up & frightening no go area; especially for a southern import living a bit further up river; it was in the 80's.

Cruddas Park in the west end of the city is another less striking relic of that age, turning albeit impoverished and run down communities, that lived side by side and back to back into more isolated enclaves of impoverished individuals piled on top of one another. All with the Smith/Poulson corruption backdrop to the regeneration politics up there.

The council house I was born into not far outside of Leicester is now a very sought after and expensive address that has been subsumed by the sweeping gentrification of the always nicer end of the town as it fell into London commuter territory and the money moved to where they could see a bit of fields and countryside in echange for an hour each way on the train.

 

[colly]

There's nothing wrong intrinsically with the idea of high rise living. After all some of the most expensive flats and apartments are gazzillions of floors up in the air. There are still a good number of 20 storey blocks in and around Leeds and when I visit them the people are by and large settled and like where they live. Being well maintained is key though and all of the blocks now have entry phone systems on. Most of the people in them though don't have kids.
Some of the council estates though are a nightmare to find your way around with no clear pattern, not even any sensible numbering system. Paths and walkways disappearing off all over the place with scant, sometimes no signage.
The council don't clean or maintain the public areas so pretty soon they get scruffy and run down and then no one bothers at all.
It's a shame because the houses are actually OK. The landlords though, that's the council, just let them crumble, usually from the outside in.

 

[Booyaa]

It's funny to see the differences in social housing, from the inner city Crescents in Hulme to the garden city of Wythenshaw. Both suffered from very similar problems despite the concepts so completely different. It is people that were the issue.