The project at Park Hill was to create nearly 1,000 flats. The site’s dramatic location, looming over the city centre from atop a craggy hilltop, raised its profile, so that the project became something of an advert for the benefits of redevelopment. The planners considered it essential that the locals from old Park Hill should be rehoused in the new scheme, whatever it turned out to be, and much consideration was given as to how a suitable environment might be created for these transposed families. After all, the slums may have been unfit for purpose, but they had helped to forge communities. ‘Despite its sanitary shortcomings,’ wrote Jack Lynn, these old streets had ‘fostered a community life’ that was ‘essentially healthy’.2 He and Ivor were determined to replicate a vibrant street scene – vertically.
At the time when Park Hill was being planned in the early fifties, one building above all others fascinated architects. Designed to be a ‘vertical garden city’ and known locally as the madhouse, Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, built immediately after the war, instantly became the pin-up of young architects around the world. This mighty slab housed 337 apartments, along with a row of shops, a nursery, a gym and a hotel. The reinforced rough-concrete frame was likened to a ‘bottlerack’, with the apartments slotted in like colourful bottles; halfway up the structure, the tidy grid was disrupted by a bigger floor that housed the public areas.
Le Corbusier had based the dimensions and details of this immense building around a set of standardised human measurements that he’d been mapping, called the Modulor. It was rational approach to design, helping to ensure that no matter the size of the project, human scale would prevail as the most important element. No matter if it were the height of door frames, the width of corridors or the depth of steps, the Modulor was there to guide the architect, engineer and builder in every aspect of the planning. Of course, it took a lot for granted, such as the size of actual people and their physical fitness – or disabilities. On every third floor the apartments were connected by internal corridors known as ‘mid-air streets’. Ship design was one of Le Corbusier’s obsessions, and observers were soon likening the Unité to a moored ocean liner. And there were many observers when the building opened in 1952. ‘For us, a trip to the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille was almost mandatory,’ wrote London County Council architect John Partridge, ‘and Stan Amis and I duly made this pilgrimage (in a prewar Morris with a leaking petrol tank stopped up with chewing gum), returning in total awe of the great master.’3 Amis and Partridge were part of a team led by Colin Lucas who, inspired by Le Corbusier, were determined to add a hard edge to the department’s work. The group set themselves up in opposition to the Arts and Crafts inspired communist faction, whose work, like the new towns, was sneeringly dismissed as ‘picturesque’, obsessed with cosy ‘people’s detailing’ and therefore ‘soft’. Frederic Osborn, garden city guardian and softy par excellence, found his views increasingly eclipsed in architectural circles. Yet he found surprising support at a conference of the International Congress of Modern Architects. ‘I was amazed, and momentarily encouraged, by support from all of the French housing people present,’ he wrote, ‘whose spokesman not only brilliantly exploded Le Corbusier’s mad 14-storey glass house at Marseille, but expressed astonishment that England, the envied country of the family home with garden, should be increasingly piling houses on top of each other.’4
But the LCC’s ‘hard’ faction quickly knocked up five fun-size Unités at the leafy Alton West estate at Roehampton – the first of many British homages that included the Queenies, Basil Spence’s blocks in the Gorbals. Down the road at Alton East an outcrop of new Scandinavian-style point blocks, planned by the ‘soft’ group, were suddenly old hat.
Park Hill had much in common with the Unité. Streets were raised into the air. A ‘bottlerack’ frame held a mixture of shops, flats and public buildings within a single structure. Yet it wasn’t to be just another miniature version of Le Corbusier’s ‘vertical garden city’. Instead, it would be an immensely stretched, undulating structure, the largest development of its kind in western Europe, connecting the entire ridge above the city centre and dividing as it progressed into a series of crescents, protruding like ragged claws.
The ‘bottlerack’ frame of Park Hill holds several different types of flat, as well as shops, cafés and pubs.
The technical challenges for Ivor and Jack, the young design duo, were daunting. They relied heavily on structural engineer Ronald Jenkins of Ove Arup, who provided many a detailed critique of their designs’ shortcomings, and spurred them on to better solutions. ‘These were exciting days,’ wrote Jack, ‘when we felt we were on the threshold of what would now be called a “breakthrough”.’5 Their most famous innovation was the ‘streets in the sky’. Whereas the streets in Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation were in reality no more than internal corridors, Park Hill incorporated great landings open to the elements, on a much bigger scale than the poky galleries on thirties blocks of flats. Another idea was to keep the roof level the same height throughout the complex, despite the steep hill on which it was built. The section built at the top of the hill was a mere four storeys high, and as the land fell away towards the bottom of the hill the estate rose to 13 storeys to maintain that constant roof line. A cunning thought from the designers further exploited this quirk of topography. Park Hill’s streets in the sky actually began at ground level at the top of the hill. The further you walked along the same level, the higher you found you were in the building, as it grew beneath you on the lower slopes. Because of this, the architects figured, that residents wouldn’t have to use lifts or stairs, because all streets in the sky touched the ground somewhere. But it was their third innovation that proved to be the most significant: ‘Each level has been provided with a sort of street in mid-air, with front doors opening onto it,’ wrote the journalist Geoffrey Moorhouse, ‘where children can play and their parents are thrown together as much as they were along the old terrace streets on the ground.’6
Walkways connect the streets in the sky to different limbs of the building.
Former Park Hill caretaker and latter day local celebrity Grenville Squires met me to talk about his memories of working there. His reminiscences of his time on the estate have enlivened numerous television and radio programmes, as well as the interactive exhibits at the local museum. Just a week before I met him I’d heard him on the radio, as part of a programme tracing the origins of Britain’s most famous piece of pre-Banksy graffiti: Clare Middleton I love you will u marry me, which had been wonkily spray painted in the eighties on one of Park Hill’s bridges, facing the city centre. Now retired and walking with the aid of a stick, he showed me into his front room, which was bedecked with homemade Fabergé-style eggs and an extensive collection of Betty Boop figurines. Grenville had prepared well for our chat, having dug out folders of information, including photographs from around the estate and some of his own poetry, which I’d once heard him reading on an Open University programme. He talked me through how the complex layout of Park Hill’s streets in the sky actually worked.
‘For each one of those landings,’ he said, pointing to one of the ‘streets,’ ‘you had three levels. A going-in level, you’d got a downstairs level and you’d got an upstairs level.’ As in the Unité d’Habitation, doors off the landings led to flats on levels immediately above and below. ‘And what they did, when you looked at Park Hill, you could see by different coloured brickwork: the top three was a different colour, the next three was a different colour.’ It is this scheme of subtly coloured bricks that Urban Splash’s acid-coloured iridescent panels have replaced.
As a caretaker, Grenville saw sides to the building that the public and residents never knew about. ‘A lot of people think Park Hill is just a block of flats, but it isn’t. There’s an infrastructure underneath, and if it weren’t for that infrastructure, Park Hill wouldn’t work.’ He showed me pictures of dark and dingy ducts under the building that instantly made me feel claustro
phobic, and regaled me with cheery tales of flooding, blocked plumbing and power failure. Then there was the Garchey waste disposal system – which with the assistance of plungers at every sink, helped fire waste down into the bowels of Park Hill, where, ingeniously, it was recycled and converted into energy to keep the flats warm.
This mind-boggling structure was built not by a private contractor like Wimpey but by the council’s own Direct Labour organisation. When Park Hill was finished in 1961, Ivor Smith and Jack Lynn’s modern utopia quickly found itself an essential stop on the itinerary for other young architects and planners, much as Le Corbusier’s building had been a decade before. ‘Sheffield has become an object of pilgrimage for many people concerned with the social and the architectural aspects of housing,’ reported The Times. ‘Some of the architectural details and finishes are, it is true, on the grim side,’ was their verdict, before concluding with unintended comedy that ‘these are not unsuited to the character of a northern industrial city.’7
It’s touching to look at the photos and footage of the early days, showing hopeful residents of all ages moving in and coming to terms with their new homes. The shock of the new still resonates from those images. Elderly working-class folk, who had grown up in the last days of Queen Victoria, shuffled incongruously about on those pale grey streets in the sky. The antiquated Austins parked against the dazzling bottlerack façade looked like ghosts, tiny and out of time. Grenville recalled one clip that stood out for him.
‘In one of these films, it’s a classic, there’s an old lady, she’s got rollers in her hair, she’s got a crossover pinafore, little glasses. And she says, “Does tha know, love, we thought we’d died and gone t’heaven.” She said, “We didn’t have to get up in the morning and make fire tha knows. 24-hour hot water. Toilet were in there, not at t’bottom of yard.” That’s classic. They moved into Park Hill, and everything was here. You weren’t cold when you were lighting fire, you just turned a dial on the wall. Everybody could wash – you didn’t have a wash day, you had a wash week. And everyone could have a bath.’
The variety of shops and public spaces in the complex soon made it a vibrant social centre.
‘You’d come off t’lift and you’d got Earl George pub,’ recalled Grenville, walking through the shops in his head, ‘then you’d got Douggie’s hardware shop, Talbot’s butchers, another little grocery shop, a bespoke curtain shop, another little greengrocers, then you’d got estate office, newsagents. Then right in middle you’d got wines and spirits. You’d got a wallpaper shop. You’d got frocks, Dempsey’s shoe shop. And other side you’d got Co-Op, a gents’ hairdressers and two ladies’ hairdressers, chip shop, betting shop, post office, Indian takeaway, and a sandwich shop. Virtually everything. You could live for weeks without leaving Park Hill.’
The planners in Glasgow had often omitted such amenities from their schemes, and their residents had dreamed of them. One local who appreciated them was planner Jo Meredith, who moved to Sheffield in 1970. We met in a café by the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield’s most famous postwar landmark. Over some tea and cake she proved to be both vigorously no nonsense and drily funny. ‘When I lived opposite Park Hill it was still vibrant,’ she said. ‘The shops were used not just by the people in Park Hill flats. I remember, the whole of that area would shop there, because it was a good local shopping centre. All the sort of essentials of life in the early seventies. And I rented a lock-up garage there. They built lock-up garages there but no one wanted them.’ It was a reminder how few working-class people could afford cars in the early seventies. At around the same time, The Times sent a journalist who came to much the same conclusion as Jo – Park Hill was a success. ‘Today, eight years after the flats were opened, it is obvious that the idea has worked. It has helped create a community that is close enough to the centre to be a part of the city’s life yet at the same time can support a flourishing parade of shops, a couple of public houses, a lively tenants’ association and a wide range of social activities.’8
‘Small children like to play together in a common garden outside their houses where they are safe from traffic.’
What of the famous streets in the sky? City architect Lewis Womersley was at pains to explain to the middle classes the ways of the tenants on these decks, famously broad enough to drive a milk-float along. ‘These people like to talk to one another without dressing up and making special calls. The women like to sit on their doorsteps and chat on warm summer afternoons and their small children like to play together in a common garden outside their houses where they are safe from traffic.’9 For a time almost everyone seemed happy with this spectacular and intimate new Park Hill – which was just as well, as equally monumental sister projects Hyde Park and Kelvin were being built along the same lines too.
Park Hill stood at the cusp of an architectural changing of the guard, as an established prewar generation in thrall to Le Corbusier’s ideas began to give way to a postwar cohort, whose most colourful representatives were Peter and Alison Smithson. At its fourth meeting, held in 1933 on a cruise to Athens, the International Congress of Modern Architects had boiled the whole complexity of city life down to four functional problems: the demands of home, work, recreation and transport. It was the job of all modern architects to solve these problems as neatly as possible. Yet the new generation was beginning to rebel against this formula. ‘Young architects today feel a monumental dissatisfaction with the buildings they see going up around them,’ wrote the Smithsons. ‘They feel that the majority of architects have lost contact with reality and are building yesterday’s dreams when the rest of us have woken up in today.’10 At one CIAM meeting, to the bafflement of the older generation, they showed photos of kids playing and having fun on the streets of old Bethnal Green, the kind of area being comprehensively redeveloped. Yes, the houses were squalid and failing, but the social life these streets had fostered was to be envied – and recreated.
Peter and Alison spearheaded a group they called, with typical superhero flash, ‘Team 10’, whose task was ‘to find new equivalents for these forms of house-groupings, streets, squares, greens, etc, as the social reality they presented no longer exists’.11 Their manifesto set out how the vibrant spirit of traditional city life could be fostered in new ways, in ‘a multi-level city with residential “streets in the air” … linked together in a multi-level continuous complex’. This sprawling, organic vision of a many-layered and complex city opposed the tidy functionalism embodied by the Unité d’Habitation. Park Hill, combining a bottle-rack frame and raised streets with the rambling informality of more familiar street patterns, was caught between two revolutions – Le Corbusier’s and the Smithsons’.
The Smithsons had stressed their departure from CIAM’s overly functionalist ideas by presenting their 1951 entry for the Golden Lane housing competition as a pop art collage rather than a sterile architectural drawing. As usual they didn’t win, but here was an urban, modern, arty and excitingly pop vision. The idea was to replicate life on the street in all its colour and fun, but in a modern way. ‘Decks would be places,’ they insisted, ‘not corridors or balconies.’12 They weren’t alone. In 1952, former Royal Engineer Denys Lasdun’s proposal for what he called a ‘cluster block’ in the flattened district of Bethnal Green looked more like a space station than a block of flats: three 14-storey columns of maisonettes were splayed like solar arrays from a circular core. Lasdun was keen to emphasise the humanity behind his design. ‘I used to lunch with [local people] to try and understand a bit more about what mattered to them, and they were proud people,’ he said. ‘It was an attempt to get some of the quality of life retained as distinct from being treated like a statistical pawn in a great prism. And they were very appreciative of this in the end, and this distinctly touched me.’13
Yet, as John Gold showed brilliantly in his book The Practice of Modernism, very little systematic community research actually took place. By 1957, Peter Willmott and Michael Young had completed their thorough sociologica
l study of Bethnal Green, Family and Kinship in East London, which became one of the most influential reports on the effects of modern planning. Though acknowledging the need for slum demolition after the war, the pair concluded that planners had thrown the baby out with the bathwater: ‘The sense of loyalty to each other amongst the inhabitants of a place like Bethnal Green is not due to buildings. It is due far more to ties of kinship and friendship which connect the people of one household to the people of another.’14
Projects like the Bethnal Green cluster blocks and Park Hill paved the way for many huge experimental ‘streets in the sky’ estates. Yet for all the planners’ talk of community, their design was based on little evidence from the very communities they were built to house. As the decades rolled by, Park Hill lost its appeal for students of architecture. Social problems made sections of the estate no-go areas, and its reputation for drugs and mugging alienated all but the most hardy of outsiders. By 1980, The Times was writing that Park Hill was an estate ‘now identified in official jargon as “areas of worst deprivation”, whose environment is “bleak, dreary and hostile”.’15 Even Park Hill architect Ivor Smith was quoted as saying ‘there were some misgivings among us that the community structure would be irrevocably upset, as indeed it was.’16
‘It’s very fashionable for people to say that the design of buildings determines the way that people behave,’ said former planner Jo Meredith, ‘and I’m not disputing that, because I believe that, but I think you’ve got to look at it with the social context and the whole demise of social housing and the lack of management on estates.’ She became increasingly despondent as we talked, with bleak news of the riots underway in my home town of Croydon colouring our conversation. ‘As the pool of housing declines after the sell-off, then the housing departments start using estates as dump estates. And I’m afraid everyone isn’t a saint. And there are people who are anti-social. And once you start putting all those people together in one place then that’s more or less the nail in the coffin, isn’t it? There’s the whole thing about the loss of working class culture and working class pride, and that’s to do with employment and the loss of manufacturing jobs, and all the stuff about belonging to a firm, like the big steel companies, or in my father’s case, a colliery, and the pride of being part of that group. I find it quite depressing, especially this week because of the riots.’ She gave me a sad look. ‘Apart from being very angry it makes me want to sit down and weep.’
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