Concretopia
Page 33
The explosion had come only two months after the blocks had been finished. It may have been a lone accident in Newham affecting just the 260 occupants of a single high-rise, but it quickly became a national scare, with the finger of blame pointing at the construction firm, the local council and ultimately the government for encouraging the boom in system-built high-rise flats. This particular block had been constructed using a ‘large panel system’ – big factory-made pre-cast slabs bolted together on site. Taylor Woodrow-Anglian, the contractors, had manufactured the panels in a factory in Lenwade, Norfolk. At the time of the explosion over 30,000 dwellings in blocks over six storeys had been built using similar systems. The Times reported that on the morning of the disaster Harry Ronan, the local councillor, in whose honour the tower had been named, had visited the scene, ‘an area in which he had lived and became well known, and met the Borough Architect, Thomas North, who was in tears. “He, like me, had been saying that the blocks were our answer,”’ Ronan told them.13
Harry Ronan may have seen him crying, but North told the Express bullishly: ‘There is nothing structurally wrong with the building. The undamaged flats could be occupied tonight if we could persuade people to go back in.’14 Thomas North’s stiff, patrician exterior, covering his private humanity and deep belief in social equality, was typical of the postwar era. But with rioting and the rise of protest movements in the late sixties, the establishment was to be challenged as never before. And as we’ll see in the following chapters, the role of the lofty expert would be diminished both by a distrusting media and a failure among those experts to adjust to a new climate of openness and sometimes hostile debate.
Larsen Nielsen’s large panel system, which had been used to build Ronan Point and eight other blocks in Newham, had been developed in Denmark in 1948, and by the sixties it was being used in 12 countries. Within 26 years 6,000 homes in Britain were either built or in the pipeline using Larsen Nielsen. Contractors Taylor Woodrow-Anglian had licensed the system from the Danes. Here was a chain of large businesses coming together to make the building of systems as cost effective as possible. Taylor Woodrow were a huge construction conglomerate, now merged with Anglian Building Products, whose speciality was the manufacture of concrete components – 100,000 tons of them each year. Together they were a highly efficient team, able to manufacture and construct buildings quickly and cheaply. All they needed were buyers.
Since 1959 Thomas North had been scoping out the best system for the area. After all, West Ham had lost a quarter of its housing in the Blitz, so he and his team had to make a difference, and fast. A postwar record for a London borough was set when by 1968 almost 15,000 new dwellings had been built in Newham, the new borough created from the merger of East and West Ham. And yet their job was still only half complete. There were still 9,000 slums to be cleared in the area.
North and his deputy Kenneth Lund had been to Liverpool and Woolwich in search of a system suited to build the nine tower blocks planned for the comprehensive development area of Clever Road. The area had been marked by Patrick Abercrombie as far back as 1944 as a site for towers. Camus, a French system, had been used in Liverpool, but Kenneth dismissed it as ‘a terrible, crude design, there was no possibility of changing it, you either took it or left it,’ which left Larsen Nielsen, the system they’d seen in 10-storey blocks in Woolwich. Here was a system where Thomas felt ‘you could have some aesthetic input!’15
The panels certainly were large: eight feet high, nine feet wide, made from solid concrete over six inches thick. The architects managed to fit 66 one-bedroom and 44 two-bedroom flats into each tower. At 210 feet high and 22 storeys, these were the highest towers to be built in Britain using the system, but they came with the assurance that Danish designers Larsen and Nielsen had personally approved the plans. As well they might, with a £5 million contract in the offing. Then there was the crew of 10–12 builders constructing each block, whose pay depended on their speed. There was a great deal invested in the swift approval and construction of the scheme for all parties concerned. What did it matter that the Larsen Nielsen system had only been designed for buildings of six storeys, and was being thrown up by a workforce of largely unskilled labour, for whom speed was the main concern? Or that 260 people would end up living there, unaware that corners had been cut during construction and that the hastily cobbled together tower was vulnerable to the slightest structural change. The worst might not happen; probably people would never find out. Only they did find out. That morning.
Here was a tower that had been built 16 storeys higher than its construction system had been designed for. Each of its large panels had been affixed with just two bolts, which started rusting as soon as water permeated the structure. Where cement, mortar or concrete should have been used to securely fix the tower’s panels together, voids were stuffed instead with newspaper, or left open. As Lynsey Hanley so dramatically describes in her book Estates, local architect Sam Webb ‘tested the size of the gaps between the floor and wall panels by dropping coins and pieces of paper through them: they fell, he said, “as if going into a slot machine”’.16 And for the want of a nut the tower was lost: it was substandard gas fitting equipment that led directly to the leak that blew apart the building. That morning each of Ronan Point’s failings were laid bare for all to see.
It wasn’t just building systems like Larsen Nielsen that were causing alarm. By the mid-sixties another problem was emerging with new concrete buildings. It would lead to the collapse of the assembly hall roof of Camden School for Girls in June 1973; the disintegration of the roof beams of the Bennett Building at Leicester University that same month; and a year later the same thing at the swimming pool of Sir John Cass’s Foundation and Red Coat Church of England Secondary School. The cause? High alumina cement: a new form of cement that in certain circumstances underwent conversion to crystalline state, making the buildings unstable and the concrete liable to crack. One man emerged as the self-appointed scourge of high alumina cement, an engineer called Geoff Scott, who described its use as ‘a mistake of horrendous proportions’.17 Scott was quite sure how the error had occurred: ‘One can fully appreciate the attitude of a site operative who adds more water to the mix to avoid time-consuming vibration when the amount of money in his back pocket on a Friday night depends on the volume of concrete poured.’18
Neither was it only this new kind of cement that was causing problems. CLASP, the prefabricated system used in many schools around the country, was found to be prone to devastating fires: Fairfields old people’s home in Nottingamshire, and Usworth Comprehensive School in County Durham both burned down in 1974, to be joined the following year by Yarborough High School in Lincoln. The link between the three was found to be voids in the roofs and vertical wall cavities – spaces that were in effect huge flues within the structure of the buildings, perfect for the incubation of fires.19 And then there were the great concrete cooling towers that collapsed in high winds. In November 1965, 85 mph winds howled through West Yorkshire, felling three out of eight new cooling towers at Ferrybridge ‘C’ Power Station. Less than a year later the biggest cooling tower in Scotland, at ICI’s Ardeer Nylon Works in Ayrshire, collapsed during a ferocious night-time storm due to cracks in the concrete.
Then in the final comprehensive development area to be completed in the Gorbals, Hutchesontown-Polmodie, known as Hutchie E, came a tale of low rise system built disaster to rival the high-rise one at Ronan Point. Approved in 1969, and opened in 1972 by the Queen, Hutchie E was built using the French Tracoba system. The resulting estate featured 759 flats, housed in a couple of 24-storey towers and 12 seven-storey blocks. They were constructed by Gilbert Ash, an offshoot of Bovis, who had a lot of experience in the field: they’d even built Britain’s very first tower block, The Lawns, in Harlow back in 1951. That had been a bespoke design built in brick and concrete, but Hutchie E showed the difference a couple of decades of technological advances in prefabrication and system building could make. It was larg
e panel all the way.
Within months of the Queen’s visit, tendrils of black mould began an insidious attack on the blocks. ‘A painter who worked on the job told me that as he put the wallpaper on it just fell off,’ wrote Phil McPhee, who chronicled the saga in his essay Hutchie E – A Monument to Corruption, Stupidity and Bad Planning.20 The reason was pure Stephen King: Hutchie E had been built over some old, abandoned mine shafts, long since flooded by water from the Clyde. Workmen struggled with flash floods, and water cascading down the newly built walls. ‘Ludicrous excuses were made,’ McPhee recalled, ‘such as: the tenants’ heavy breathing, gas heating, sleeping with windows open, condensation.’21 After a decade of spirited resident action and protest, the unfortunates housed in Hutchie E were moved out, and the deck access blocks were demolished in 1987. They were the first of the new comprehensive development area buildings to bite the dust. In a few short years, modern construction techniques and materials had ceased to be viewed as marvels of hi-tech engineering. Instead they were the scourge of modern living: not just ugly in the eyes of many, but lethal too.
Three months after the explosion at Ronan Point, Anthony Greenwood, the Minister of Housing and Local Government, set in motion a structural survey of all large panel system blocks in England and Wales, with Scotland following suit soon after. Over a third of the 162 blocks in Scotland to be re-evaluated were in high-rise Glasgow. Sociologist Pearl Jephcott, in researching that city for her book Homes in High Flats, remarked that the Ronan Point collapse ‘did not seem to peturb these tenants about their own safety. Nor did Clydeside’s furious gale of January 1968, although some high flats had their windows sucked in, people saw their furniture moving across the bedroom, and in some flats the lights and lifts went off.’22 Yet it certainly perturbed Eileen McConnachie, an ex-eighteenth floor resident of the city’s towering Red Road flats, a scheme which, like Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower, had eschewed building systems. Eileen told the Herald that ‘on one particularly windy night my husband found that the wardrobe had moved four inches because of the tilt of the building.’ Not for her the stiff upper lip displayed by Jephcott’s subjects: ‘I was delighted to get out of a multi-storey.’23
The problems Pearl Jephcott encountered were of a social rather than architectural nature. Tenants of the tower blocks she visited complained predictably of lawlessness, of drunks vomiting or pissing in the lifts, but also of the heavy-handed management style, with negative notices posted everywhere, from No Loitering to overbearing instructions concerning rubbish disposal. A young mother living on the nineteenth floor of one block told Jephcott that ‘the lifts are quite often off. Once or twice I’ve had to walk up. They are a bit better now. The kids have started to paint on the walls which annoys me.’24 The sociologist noted that ‘the highly artificial character of the layout of the multi-storey estate demands extra careful upkeep.’25 And when such upkeep broke down, vandalism bedded in. On one estate Jephcott found railings had been broken down, telephone equipment torn out, handles wrenched off fire doors, and lights on the estate’s Christmas tree broken. As far back as Christmas 1962 the Herald was reporting on a ‘catalogue of complaints at Glasgow skyscrapers’ at Roystonhill, where ‘tenants have complained of lifts jammed with delivery men’s milk crates, of common rooms used as rubbish dumps, of broken windows in the laundry rooms, of refuse disposal chutes used as bowling alleys for empty beer bottles; and of noise’.26
By the seventies, local papers across the country were brimming with shocking stories of high-rise vandalism, deprivation and despair. ‘A 26-year-old mother plunged to the ground from the eleventh floor of a Birmingham tower block holding her two-year-old baby son,’ the Newcastle Journal reported in 1977, ‘because her skyscraper flat was a prison.’27 The Evening Chronicle had also followed the story, and asked some Newcastle residents for their tower block experiences. Doris Cuthbertson lived in Shenfield House, built by Stanley Miller, and told a reporter: ‘I don’t feel at home here. After I’ve been out for a couple of hours it feels like I’m going back to jail.’28 Cruddas Park, once so proudly looked after by Ken Denholm, was in a parlous state by the eighties, beset by glue-sniffing, graffiti and vandalism. One grim report for the local paper followed a glue-fuelled rampage in the Sycamores. ‘The door entry system is out of order, there’s urine on the floor, graffiti in the lift and human excrement on the stairs … Older residents say it used to be a joy to live in.’ The two journalists visited the top floor flat where the door had been kicked in and there was vomit on the floor. ‘We meet a frail, elderly woman and ask her if she knows what happened but she is terrified of being seen talking to us. She says, “I’m terrified. I’m just shaking. I’ve lived here for 13 years and the past few weeks is the worst I’ve ever seen.”’29
In 1964 over 27,000 high-rise flats were approved by the government. Following the explosion at Ronan Point there was a sharp drop, and as the financial crisis deepened, construction slowed almost to a standstill. By 1978 only 37 new flats in high-rise buildings got the go-ahead. Between 1956 and 1967 the government had run a scheme to subsidise the building of high-rise flats. This subsidy increased in line with the height of tower. When the scheme ended, Ernő Goldfinger was just one of the people who attacked the government for their decision. ‘I am appalled,’ he told The Times. ‘It is a ridiculous attitude that will put us back 30 years.’30 But the man who’d overseen the design of Park Hill’s streets in the sky in Sheffield was rather less bothered. ‘Unless you have a bad land shortage, I don’t think there is much of a case for them any more,’ Lewis Womersley told the Guardian. ‘If more are to be built, they will have to be special designs with extra amenities – like interconnecting decks for children to play in, with easy access to the ground. A lot of the bad name which high flats have got is because the needs of the occupants were forgotten.’31
‘High-rise flats. A great idea at the time.’
Eddie McGonnell, former resident and cheerleader for Basil Spence’s blocks in the Gorbals, has had more experience of them than most. ‘And then people began finding, maybe it’s not such a good idea. We might want people to get houses with a back and front door and a garden. But at the time … there was no option, that wasn’t on the table. You were coming from this tenement where you never had a bedroom, you never had a bath, you had to go to the toilet outside, where everybody was using it, but going to the Gorbals it was like mardi gras, that’s what it was like.’
People who criticised Eddie’s beloved Queenies were ‘thinking about the Basil Spence flats at the end, the way they ended up. They became dilapidated, which happens when you’re not getting investment from the city council. If they’d had investment the people that were in them would have maybe have taken more pride in them as well.’
How had he felt when the blocks were demolished in 1993, after two floods and a crime wave, less than 30 years after they were opened?
‘Very sad. It felt as if part of your life was being taken away. I remember seeing a programme on the telly with the Queen. She was crying over Britannia. You never see the Queen showing emotion. That’s the way we felt when we seen that happening. That was our childhood, we grew up there.’
The crime levels, the dirty corridors, broken-down lifts and smashed lights … Eddie was sure of one thing: it wasn’t the architect who was at fault, rather a lack of investment in the upkeep of the buildings. ‘I think Spence was a visionary, but he was too far ahead of the culture. He was the scapegoat, the whipping boy. It was the council that was to blame.’
This official insouciance endured, tragically, to the very end. When the Queenies – Alcatraz, Barlinnie and Sing-Sing – were blown up by demolition specialists, their failure to use the correct amount of explosive or sound a warning horn led to one spectator being killed by flying rubble.
‘It felt as if part of your life was being taken away … That was our childhood, we grew up there.’ The demolition of Basil Spence’s Queen Elizabeth flats in 1993. © Simon Chirgwin
/> By contrast, in 2011 when I went to visit Katharine Hibbert in Balfron Tower, Ernő Goldfinger’s great east London block, it was having a facelift.
‘Because this block is listed they’re doing massive renovations,’ she told me. ‘You can see the cranes and everything. They’re really snazzing the whole place up. This being listed, they can’t knock it down which is what I think they’d have liked to do because I don’t think it’s very popular with the council tenants … So instead they’re gonna tart it all up and then sell it off … They’re gonna put in new lift shafts, new rubbish chutes, all the windows are gonna be new. Carradale House’ – the low rise block in the cluster – ‘is going to carry on being social housing, but this one isn’t. And in a way I think that makes sense because if people in social housing almost inevitably are old or have children this is not a suitable place, whereas your yuppies who want to live in a brutalist classic …’ She gestured around the room. It was certainly all here for them, those concrete fetishists. ‘It’ll be interesting to see who moves in because it’s never going to be a posh area – unless they changed all the housing. It’s never going to be that much different from how it is. And I just think that if you were driving a Porsche and working in Canary Wharf, even if it wasn’t true, you’d just feel like you were going to get mugged. You wouldn’t feel good living somewhere like this. I think the trouble will be if they sell them all off and they get sold to buy-to-let people and it’s less well-off people living in them but still really transient, so you don’t have the benefit of it being council tenants where at least they’re permanent, at least they’ve got a stake.’