by James Meek
From my window, council houses – many of them privatised – are what I see. On the far side of Roman Road are the barracks-style brown brick walkways of the Greenways estate, built in the 1950s, solid and unremarkable, renovated not long ago, providing homes for hundreds; beyond them, its crown poking up beyond the Greenways roof, is Denys Lasdun’s listed Sulkin House, built on the site of a bombed church, twin stacks of council maisonettes at an angle to each other, linked by a central, cylindrical shaft, like an open book propped on end – an early attempt to create a vertical street. But the main vista is on an altogether more epic scale, an inhabited twentieth-century Stonehenge, a seventeen-acre site of six towers and five lower blocks, widely spaced apart and angled in such a way that at least one face will always be catching the sun and the shadows cast by the towers will rotate like the spokes of a wheel. This is the Cranbrook Estate.
Cranbrook calls attention to itself. It’s startlingly different from other estates. The piloti – stilt-like struts cut in from the building’s outside edge at ground level – of the high towers are shared with Le Corbusier’s modernist étalon, the Marseille Unité d’Habitation (which is smaller), but the most striking feature of the blocks, to the non-architect, are the superfluous details that depart from Le Corbusier’s functional modernism: the flying cornices, concrete frames like giant handles that jut from the tower roofs, and the frog-green bosses studding the beige brick façades. The initial effect is of some vast, elegant set of combination locks, or duochrome Rubik’s cubes, poised at any moment to whirr and counterspin, floor by floor, to trigger the catch on some deeper, hidden secret. Yet familiarity humanises it. You become aware not only of how soaked in light it is but of the architects’ legacy to the people who live there. Close to Roman Road is a crescent of red brick bungalows for the elderly, grouped around a garden with a fountain and a bronze sculpture by Elizabeth Frink, The Blind Beggar and His Dog. The toy-like bungalows are superficially so different from the beige and green high-rises behind them that you might assume they had nothing to do with each other, yet they were part of the plan from the start.
The architects hired by the then Bethnal Green Council for the project, built between 1955 and 1966, were the trio of Francis Skinner, Douglas Bailey and an elder mentor, the legendary bringer of the torch of modern architecture to Britain from Europe, Berthold Lubetkin. There’s a received idea that Lubetkin was only peripherally involved in the design of Cranbrook. He was living in rural Gloucestershire, where he’d been based ever since evacuating his family there in 1939, farming pigs and brooding over the collapse of his hopes of becoming the master builder of a new town for coal-miners in Peterlee, County Durham. Yet as his biographer John Allan has shown, Lubetkin didn’t step back from his vocation till much later. Indeed, he was responsible for the overarching design of Cranbrook. Each month he would come up to London, sketchbook bulging with plans.
Lubetkin and his protégés, backed by the public purse of Bethnal Green and London County Council, make an easy target for haters of publicly subsidised housing, for haters of the experimental in architecture, and for those more nuanced sceptics who believe with great passion in state housebuilding but condemn the execution of the great concrete monuments of residential modernism. The argument is that councils treated their tenants like factory-farmed livestock, stacking them on top of one another in concrete boxes in defiance of their traditional British desire for two-up, two-down homes with a patch of garden; that they left them prey to the visions of egotistical architects, who thought only of the grandiose shapes they would carve in concrete, shapes they would never imagine themselves inhabiting, or their children, or anyone they knew. There’s much truth in this. In her book Estates (2007) Lynsey Hanley, who was brought up on a council estate on the edge of Birmingham, mocks architectural critics who describe various notorious London council tower blocks as inspiring ‘a delicate sense of terror’ or ‘incredibly muscular, masculine, abstract structures, with no concession to an architecture of domesticity’.
‘After all,’ Hanley remarks, ‘domesticity is the last thing you need when you have a family to raise.’ The professional avantgarde’s take on residential modernism, she argues, ‘seems to fall for the idea that housing should be art. It ought to be beautiful, yes, but not at the expense of the people who have to live in it.’ She doesn’t explicitly mention the work of Bailey, Skinner and Lubetkin in Bethnal Green, but Lubetkin and his work on Cranbrook would seem, on the face of it, to conform to her archetype of the selfish modernist. Her critique is from the democratic left, but the legacy of Lubetkin and Cranbrook could just as easily be damned by conservative aesthetes in the mould of Prince Charles as having yoked the English working man to alien, totalitarian forms of dwelling.
Lubetkin, who died in 1990, gave his critics plenty to work with. He did have an ego; he deployed his enormous intellect with more force than tact. He and his wife, Margaret, were lifelong communists, and his early designs for Cranbrook were sketched under the influence of a trip he had made to his native Russia in 1953, after the death of Stalin, where the superhuman scale of state planning’s achievements thrilled him:
The broad expanse of the Volga drawn into the composition of rebuilt Stalingrad by a wide cascade of gigantic granite steps; the huge stadium which seems as broad as it is long; the ribbon of the Volga-Don canal in the midst of the arid steppe, with its sparkling foaming sluices; the generous openness of the forecourts and parks on which the new university building is presented to old Moscow, where the limitless parklands merge with the sky, and the horizon, as at sea, is imperceptible; these are sights that no architect who has been fortunate enough to see them will easily forget.
In reality, Lubetkin was too idiosyncratic to be a modernist, too liberal to be a Stalinist. Far from being a harmonious and cynical collaboration between municipality and architect, the Cranbrook Estate bears the mark of Lubetkin’s despair at Bethnal Green and the London County Council, for which housebuilding had become a numbers game, where architectural vision and the sense of building a better world for working people had shrunk to sheaves of norms, regulations and pro formas – the first signs of an entry point for the privatisers (Harold Macmillan coined the phrase Right to Buy in the 1950s). Lubetkin had been thwarted in his desire to ally his ego and talent to progressive causes ever since he arrived in Britain from Paris in 1931. His early commissions were private flats for the wealthy and zoo buildings, including the extant penguin pool at London Zoo. Only for a brief time, when he worked with Finsbury Council in mid-century, did he come close to what he wanted: to listen attentively to the needs of residents and workers, then interpret their commission in his own way, with the support of secure, trusting patrons. Even then he was hobbled by postwar parsimoniousness.
When Lubetkin first expounded his vision for Cranbrook to his council backers, he started with medieval metaphysics and moved through to the Enlightenment via Copernicus, Descartes and Tintoretto. Was this the ludicrous self-importance of a man out of touch with working-class realities, or the sense of responsibility of an artist-craftsman who, despite his disillusionment, couldn’t but take seriously the job of building homes for more than five hundred families? I prefer the second version. These were the days when councils’ idea of consultation with future residents was to find out how many bodies there were and produce a piece of paper for the architect called a ‘surrogate briefing’ which listed the number of units required to put them in. Seen in that light the secret message of Cranbrook is its stand-out otherness. The sense it offers to the passer-by that whoever was responsible for it was striving with unusual mental ferocity to realise an obscure and arcane task he considered incredibly important is exactly the sign Lubetkin and his collaborators wanted to draw. A sign that read ‘No council block must be just another council block’; a sign that read ‘This matters’. He doubted even then whether it would be read. Towards the end of his life, he’d come to feel, he told Allan, that
the public themse
lves became more and more disillusioned with any idea that art or architecture could lift them up or foreshadow a brighter future. Instead of looking at architecture as the backdrop for a great drama – the struggle towards a better tomorrow – they began to see only the regulations, housing lists, points systems, et cetera, and so expect only ‘accommodation’ … it made all our efforts seem so hollow.
Doreen Kendall was one of the original tenants of Puteaux House, one of the tower blocks on the Cranbrook Estate, completed in 1964. She’s lived there ever since, in a two-bedroom, two-storey flat on one of the high floors; she and her late husband raised a daughter there. The common parts of Puteaux House are a little down at heel but the spaces are generous and light. Looking up from the lobby you can see the teardrop crosssection of Lubetkin’s stairwell stretching up to the heights. In the early days children used to slide down the bannisters non-stop from the fifteenth floor to the ground. There’s an intimacy and a familiarity within this vertical community. When I visited, we could hear somebody vacuuming the floor of the flat upstairs. ‘She does all the corners every Friday,’ Kendall said.
With their discount and an inheritance, the Kendalls were able to buy their flat in 1984. Rents had been going up and they thought they’d have a more powerful voice in dealings with the council if they became leaseholders. On the estate as a whole, about a third of the flats are in private hands. Kendall was astonished when I told her that councils had been forced to use the money they got from Right to Buy to pay down their share of the government’s general debt. ‘I thought it was in a pot, waiting to be used again,’ she said. ‘I thought there was a housing account that everything went into and they were just waiting for the government to release it.’
One by one, the original Right to Buyers are checking out of Cranbrook. ‘There’s about fifteen that have bought and they’ve died off and the flats’ve been sold. Arthur downstairs died over Christmas, and his flat’s for sale. Sonny over in Offenbach, he died just before Christmas and his flat’s up for sale. They’ll be bought by people to be relet on short tenancies. You get to know people, they’re very nice, then all of a sudden they’re gone.’
Kendall is a fisherman’s daughter, born in Milford Haven in 1929, who got her school leaver’s certificate and moved from Pembrokeshire to the eastern edge of London to stay with her aunt and look for work. There she met John, a tailor in Bethnal Green, and moved in with him to a private rental in the East End. They were offered a place on the Cranbrook Estate after their old house was demolished.
The standard left-progressive history of what happened in Bethnal Green is that democratically elected, enlightened municipal authorities rescued the poor citizens of the borough from insanitary, crowded slums and gave them modern, healthy places to live at a reasonable rent, places that often delighted their new tenants, before institutional neglect, competitive consumerism and budget cuts took the shine off estate life. But there’s an alternative, subversive account, which suggests that at some point – perhaps the 1950s, perhaps even earlier – ‘slum clearance’ began to merge into something else, the needless destruction of fundamentally sound old terraced houses which councils could have bought and modernised.
Kendall, who happens to be secretary of the East London Historical Society, subscribes to both versions of events. She and her husband adored the old two-room private flat they rented in St Peter’s Avenue, and fought a long, bitter and unsuccessful battle with the council to prevent it and the neighbouring homes being knocked down. ‘It was a lovely house,’ she said. ‘These days they would have done them up because when you go down Columbia Road the houses aren’t as nice. It had a huge old garden. The toilet was just outside the back door. It didn’t worry us. It had shutters and brass fittings – it wasn’t a slum. We were absolutely heartbroken when they cleared the houses from there.’
Rather than seeing the move from St Peter’s Avenue to the Cranbrook Estate as an expulsion from Victorian East End Eden to concrete council tower block hell, however, Kendall embraced her new home with the same fervour. ‘I loved it,’ she said. ‘I absolutely adored it. We had central heating so we didn’t need to light a fire any more. My husband thought we’d moved into a ship. All the walls were painted grey, battleship grey. Everything was grey except the wall where my books are and the bathroom, which was red, a dusty red.’ The Kendalls avoided the alienation from the familiar rhythms of the city experienced by other East Enders who moved out to suburban council estates. ‘You knew everybody anyway because you’d moved in with them. It wasn’t a case of making new friends.’
Kendall pointed to the armchair where I was sitting and told me Lubetkin had sat in that very place, asking how she liked her new digs. I was sceptical: perhaps it was Skinner, or Bailey? But Kendall insisted it had been the old man himself, strong Russian accent and all. ‘I always had the impression that he was the boss. We all used to come, all the mums, and meet him and he’d say: “How’s things working?” He’d come in and have a biscuit and a cup of tea and he’d say that no matter what flat he went into, his décor went with the furniture. He was very proud that everything went together.’
What Kendall has taken from the ruins of her previous home is a determination not to let the authorities mutilate the grandeur and pleasingness of her habitat a second time. She pointed out all the ways the council has departed from Lubetkin and his partners’ design. The blocks used to be heated from central boilers, but these were shut down and replaced by individual boilers for each flat; as a result ugly white pipes now hang off the towers, like sheets knotted together by escaping prisoners. Originally the façades of the towers were cut into by deep openings that left the broad hallways between flats open to the air and gave Kendall a view of St Paul’s Cathedral; after the 1987 storm, the council replaced them with blank steel shutters that close off the view from inside and, from outside, echo the bleak appearance of a row of shuttered shops. The green bosses studding the façades of the towers were originally made of concrete faced with glass beads that glittered in the sun; the council replaced them with aluminium boxes. Now when it rains, residents are driven mad by the sound of the drops rattling on the metal. The Historical Society’s repeated efforts to get Cranbrook listed have been rebuffed. ‘The council doesn’t realise what wonderful buildings they’ve got here,’ Kendall said. ‘We’re just the Cranbrook Estate.’
Lubetkin’s last artistic statement to the world was his finishing touch to the estate. In his vision, a broad, tree-lined pedestrian boulevard was to lead from Roman Road through Cranbrook to the great open space of Victoria Park. The boulevard exists, but the council refused to buy the last sliver of land blocking Cranbrook from the park’s chestnut trees and ornamental lake. Lubetkin filled the melancholy dead end that resulted with a trompe l’oeil sculpture of a ramp and receding hoops, which, as you approached it, seemed to take you towards some mysterious, hopeful future point. It’s gone now; the council failed to maintain it. When I saw her, Kendall had just had a circular from the council announcing a new initiative to give children ‘a sense of ownership’ of the estate by encouraging them to express themselves freely with paint on the walls around the old sculpture. The project was to be called ‘Bling My Hood’.
In 1963 the anarchist housing writer Colin Ward took a walk through Bethnal Green. He saw one of Denys Lasdun’s new council blocks, admired Britain’s first ever large-scale council housing, the handsome, Hanseatic-looking Boundary Estate, and saw the demolition of the area’s first great effort at philanthropic housing, the gloomy Victorian model workers’ tenements of Columbia Square, funded by Baroness Burdett-Coutts under the badgering of Charles Dickens. The square was being knocked down to make way for another Bailey, Skinner and Lubetkin project. Ward saw temporary wooden housing, the ‘prefabs’, some old enough to have gardens round them, some new. Bethnal Green’s prefabs were, Ward wrote, ‘simply the latest, temporary exhibit in what is not only a sociologist’s zoo, but an architectural museum. It’s all there
, every mean or patronising or sentimental or brutal or humane assumption about the housing needs of the urban working class.’
Bethnal Green is still an architectural museum, or perhaps, now that Tower Hamlets is officially Britain’s fastest growing borough, an architectural gallery, a showroom for housing policies. New housing versions emerge. Converted schools. Converted churches. Converted synagogues. Converted hospitals. Since Pat Quinn moved to Whitechapel the match factory where her mother worked has been turned into private flats. The factory’s old water tower was the platform from which the army proposed to shoot down airborne threats to the 2012 Olympics, which were held a mile from Quinn’s old house. The borough teems with estate agents. Private developers are building and marketing flats along the Tower Hamlets stretch of the Regent’s Canal – which not that long ago was a derelict, post-industrial, don’t-go-there-after-dark place – as if the canalfront were the Côte d’Azur. And yet there are still an awful lot of poor people living here, old, sick, unemployed or just badly paid, in the economic shadow between London’s two financial districts, the City and Canary Wharf. As everywhere in the South-East, there is a huge, growing, unsatisfied need for housing that doesn’t require you to earn an above average income to afford. With the original council housing stock still dwindling and not being replaced, how is that need going to be met? One possibility is that slums will come back. Already 40 per cent of homes let at below market rents in Tower Hamlets are officially classed as overcrowded. Tower Hamlets has been less forthcoming about overcrowding in the private sector than its eastern neighbour, Newham, which has proclaimed a crackdown on ‘beds in sheds,’ but the problem exists. In 2011 a private landlord was fined £20,000 for ignoring orders from Tower Hamlets to improve two ex-council flats he’d bought and rented out. Each flat had two bedrooms and a living room: the landlord had split each living room in two to create, in all, four tiny bedsits. At one flat he’d tried to expand further by building what inspectors describe as a ‘lean-to’. One of the flats – damp, cold and unsafe, infested with roaches and bedbugs – had seven people living in it. A new fad is ‘rent to rent’, where somebody will rent a flat and then squeeze subtenants into the available floor space till they’re making a premium on the rent they pay the original landlord.