A New Kind of Bleak. Owen Hatherley
the Tories out of London’, the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire, Militant Liverpool, Livingstone’s ‘loony left’ GLC. Some on that list were more successful than others, and ‘Socialism in One Borough’ was always a bit of a stretch, but Poplar did win significant victories. Labour might not have taken the whole of London in the 1930s without their example, and the huge amount of public housing in Poplar today is surely evidence of how seriously they took their task. Some might feel it a shame that none of the old, seedy, dockland Poplar survives today, but the Poplarists would have seen that as a resounding success. Their determination to take on the government contrasts with the current craven stance of councils forced to implement the most extreme cuts. The option to fight is there, if they are willing to risk the court cases and prison sentences. The fact that the current Mayor of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman, presents himself as a left-of-Labour diehard, suggests that there may be contemporary potential here too, though Respect, the left-of-Labour party that once nearly took control of the council, has disintegrated almost completely, with some of its councillors even joining the Tories.
Poplarism’s built legacies are not always well treated by Tower Hamlets council, it must be noted. Poplar Town Hall, an art deco building with a Socialist Realist frieze of local trades and workers, is now Bow Business Centre, a gratuitous but typical insult. Poplar Baths are derelict. The estates are often very good indeed, whether the mansion flats or incongruous cottages built under Lansbury himself or the Cockneyfied modernism of the Attlee government’s Lansbury Estate, but the boarded-up or rotting high streets in between them are not models of a surviving socialist enclave. The DLR runs up, down and across, trying gamely to make the place more coherent. The work of Tower Hamlets itself, the later 1960s system-built estates, make a depressing complement to the yuppie fistulae that have shot off from the bowels of Canary Wharf. And the Mini-Manhattan there is an entirely inescapable presence. If you really want to see the London that neoliberalism built at its Brazilified worst, at its most brutally segregated and stratified, if you want to make yourself unconscionably angry, you must go to where Poplar meets Canary Wharf. The Docklands Light Railway, several car parks, the Blackwall Tunnel approach and the Crossrail building site slice the area in two. On one side, towers of trading floors and ‘luxury flats’; on the other the crumbling remnants of public housing. Among these remnants is Robin Hood Gardens.
This estate of two long, curving blocks was designed by Alison and Peter Smithson in 1969, and is scheduled for demolition by owners Tower Hamlets Council. When it was built, it was already seen as dated. It derived from the Smithsons’ ideas for the Golden Lane bombsite just outside the Square Mile, where rather than just dropping blocks in parkland, they would try and design something that had the intuitive, dense, warm communal life of the areas that had been bombed and that were being cleared as slums. These ideas were properly implemented by largely unheralded architects at Sheffield City Council; the Smithsons’ own version was, curiously, far less tectonically or socially convincing, for all the architects’ relentless theorizing and self-promotion. Park Hill is a world-class masterpiece, Robin Hood Gardens its slightly gawkier, provincial cousin. However, you don’t demolish somewhere just for being somewhat architecturally unresolved. When Tower Hamlets announced their intention to pull it down, Building Design launched a petition and a very high-profile campaign – a brave move on the part of editor Amanda Baillieu, one which put them out on a limb when rivals like the Architects’ Journal sniffily disassociated themselves from the campaign, aligning themselves with the advocates of class cleansing. It’s here that things get complicated.
Tower Hamlets has a massive shortage of council housing, which should be enough to make the case for the buildings’ renovation. Yet signatories to the petition, ranging from self-help philosophers to property developers, were all too keen for it to be restored in a similar manner to formerly council-owned buildings like Denys Lasdun’s Keeling House, where ‘restoration’ meant privatization and the expulsion of tenants, or Bloomsbury’s Brunswick Centre, where a majority of the inhabitants are actually designers. Accordingly Tower Hamlets were able to play people’s champion, claiming that their proposals – selling off the site and increasing density sevenfold, with no guarantee that tenants could return bar a vague commitment to some ‘affordable’ housing in its replacement8 – would put ‘people before buildings’. Tower Hamlets have repeatedly claimed that their coffee-morning consultations show that a majority of residents want the place demolished, but a recent survey carried out by a long-term tenant found 80 per cent wanted it renovated and refurbished.9 Described by its architects as ‘a building for the socialist dream’, the estate sits oddly next to a world centre for unrestrained capitalism. The estate is run-down, with virtues and flaws like any other – its famed ‘streets in the sky’ clearly work well, for example, with residents chatting and leaving their doors open, at least during the day. The stairwells are harshly claustrophobic, unlike the sensitively designed lift lobbies. The concrete, which picks up light beautifully, is harsh to the touch on the exterior walls, smoothing down to a soft, clean surface when you get to the entrances of the flats; which are poky, albeit nowhere near as poky as the average contemporary ‘luxury flat’. A random pattern of concrete slats gives off a threatening ambience, offset by vegetable gardens and a spacious park. The Blackwall Tunnel approach road passes adjacent, defeating even the most impressive attempt at creating a humane environment. It’s a strange place, but by no means an unsalvageable one – if you ignore its place at the heart of a class war over London’s space. Robin Hood Gardens’ likely successors have been decided upon, designed by multinational hacks Aedas after several London firms publicly called for a boycott of the competition: there will be architecturally nondescript, internally cramped ‘executive’ high-rises. Few seem interested in defending the place as viable council housing. The real story here is not about the qualities or otherwise of big concrete buildings, but about the uninterrupted denigration of council housing and the expansion of London’s second financial district.
Tower Hamlets are, it must be admitted, over a barrel. Hugely underfunded, running one of the poorest places in Europe, they have evidently decided that selling their land and desperately crossing their fingers that some of their voters will get rehoused in the ‘affordable’ units will help keep the wolf from the door. The Housing Associations have no such excuse. Next to Robin Hood Gardens is the Brownfield Estate, designed by Hungarian architect and Communist fellow-traveller Erno Goldfinger, who moved in here for a few months to make sure everything worked properly. As a piece of architecture, it achieves with ease all the things which the Smithsons fussed over. The flats are large and simple, the bared concrete is beautiful, detailed with a craftsman’s obsessiveness, the communal areas largely make sense, and the buildings have an impressive sense of order and controlled drama. Much of it is undemonstrative low-rise flats, with concrete frames and brick infill, but the three buildings that always get noticed are more, well, ‘iconic’. Glenkerry House is a ten-storey tower with services on top that are modelled like a work of Constructivist sculpture; it is owned by a residents’ co-operative, so is exempt from the current redevelopment. Carradale House is a long, low concrete block connected by external walkways, thrown out to a futurist length, angled around the central image – the vertiginous Balfron Tower, which skyscrapes its way up to overlook much of East London. It’s often seen as the first draft of Goldfinger’s slightly later Trellick Tower, but it’s a design all of its own, animating its attempt to protect residents from the din and ugliness of the Blackwall approach without the clumsy, fortress-like enclosure resorted to by the Smithsons. It has, however, had done to it what many of Robin Hood Gardens’ advocates have demanded.
After one of those desultory low-turnout ballots of residents, the estate was given to a housing association, Poplar HARCA, with the usual promises that only they could renovate the flats to a decent standard after so many decades of neglect. What they did instead was move out the existing residents, move in artists (who did a few projects about the departing tenants) and propose to demolish most of the low-rise housing in the estate, leaving only the icons. In this case the residents weren’t even ‘decanted’, or given the promise that they could come back, because apparently they had not asked to be rehoused here. Though of course there will be an ‘affordable’ percentage of the renovated flats when they do emerge. This is where the political conformism that still, maddeningly, pervades local authorities gets us: a clearance either way, but you can choose your style of class cleansing, from stunning development to preserved 1960s heritage.