Demolishing housing estates

Why is Robin Hood Gardens not fit for purpose?

Most of the residents in 1990 wanted them to be refurbished but the council did not because there was a large green space for the children to play, which they want to cover with houses, and create all the corners for drug dealers to hide behind.

It's not a high rise block. Compared to the Barbican, it's low rise.

"We met on the hill in between the two blocks, like spies in a cold war film.The windows and concrete mullions are crumbling and the blocks have none of the greenery that softens the concrete facades of the Barbican. Many residents have fitted security grilles to their flats, suggesting a fear of other residents or outsiders, or both. The lifts are coffin-like and slow, unlike the Barbican’s spacious and efficient lifts. But the flats, built to Parker Morris standards, are spacious, and the structure appears mostly sound. The estate cost £1.8m to build, a figure that has been wiped away by inflation.

Brennan said that when Robin Hood Gardens was designed in the late 1960s, New Brutalism had become a key architectural expression of the welfare state. As part of her project she invited residents to explore the uncomfortable story of redevelopment and the ideological attack on council homes.

If Robin Hood Gardens had been blessed with a different owner perhaps it would now be as desirable a place to live as the Barbican. But it would be easy to blame the management and allocation policies of the GLC and Tower Hamlets for its decline. The wider issue is the sustained assault on social housing over the past 35 years. Councils have been forced to send half of their rents and most of their receipts from house sales to Whitehall and the level of management and investment could never match that of the wealthier residents at the Barbican."

The article does not say the Barbican was built as a private estate; it says it is one now. It said it was built by the GLC.

In the 60s all council housing was built to Parker Morris standards, and very good they were, too. The council want to knock the flats down and build rabbit hutches, the sort of houses that everybody complains about. That's the only way they can get that number of houses on the site.

So what is your solution? Spend all the available money restoring the 200 nplus flats and forget about the other 1,250 families who must continue living in poor accommodation, but who could otherwise have been housed on this site if the demolition and rebuilding had gone ahead?

The Barbican flats were never run of the mill council flats. I seem to remember that right from the start there were well known people living there who could not possibly have qualified for council accommodation.

I remember visiting a privately owned or rented flat there in, at the latest, the early 1980s, and possibly up to a decade earlier. I believe the National Union of Miners long paid the rent of flat there for Arthur Scagill. I think he still occupies his pied a terre there, although following a court case a year or two ago, he now pays the rent himself.

Personally I would rather live in a 'rabbit hutch' with a tiny garden of my own than a high rise flat, so I don't think 'everyone' would be complaining about them.

However, I may be alone, everyone else may prefer to live in a tower block with a balcony.

You haven't said why it is not fit for purpose, Monica.

There aren't going to be 1450 houses built on this one site. They are demolishing a lot of houses in the same area and building new ones. There is no reason why a block of flats cannot be left and refurbished in the middle. All houses are a mix of old and new. The oldest houses in this village were built over 300 years ago. They did not knock them down to rebuild new ones.
I do not think refurbishment of 200+ flats will take all the money.
However, the reason they have blighted this block is given in the third paragraph I copied; the assault on social housing.
They want to remove the residents who are there because they do not fit in with their view of the future for the estate.

So what size rabbit hutch do you live in, Jalima?

My best friend rented a flat in the Barbican in 1973 Monica.
I don't know if it was privately owned or sublet from a council tenant

The windows and concrete mullions are crumbling and the blocks have none of the greenery that softens the concrete facades of the Barbican. Many residents have fitted security grilles to their flats, suggesting a fear of other residents or outsiders, or both. The lifts are coffin-like and slow, unlike the Barbican’s spacious and efficient lifts. But the flats, built to Parker Morris standards, are spacious, and the structure appears mostly sound.

There is no doubt that the Robin Hood Gardens estate could be refurbished, but the costs would be high

Both quotes from the Guardian article

That's okay, then. The structure is sound. Costs of knocking them down and rebuilding would be higher.

Why not? The demolition and rebuilding will provide 1,000 extra homes.

Demolition and rebuilding to get extra homes on a site is not a peculiarity of the public sector. The first house we bought was built in the large garden of a large structurally sound house that was demolished to make space for the new estate going up on the site. It continues to happen, or it least it does where I live, in both the state and private sector.

durhamjen funny you should ask that, two of us live in a house which is probably a bit big for our needs; however when we lived in London six of us were crammed into a rabbit hutch very small house because property was more expensive (but not like it is now of course).
Three DC in one bedroom and DS lucky enough to have his own, 6'x6'.
The rabbit and guinea pig lived outside.

Hard to argue with demolishing and building a lot more houses there!

Houses of Parliament are in a poor state of repair and need billions spent on them.
Why not knock them down and build lots of houses there instead?
MPs and Lords could find a nice office block close by.

Houses Of Parliament, beautiful and historic , Robin Hood flats, plug ugly?
Yes, I know it was just your sarcasm Djen but really!

Beautiful and historic doesn't give people a home

And while we are at it demolish every single historic building in the country; churches, museums , stately homes and all listed buildings. My goodness that would free up a lot of building land.

I really do not understand what your point is durhamjen. At the start of this thread I argued that the solution to sink estates was not demolition but social measures to solve social problems. But that doesn't mean that no council estate should ever be demolished, anymore than I would argue that privately owned housing should never be demolished. A decision has to be made on a case by case basis.

A significant number of high density inner city developments built in the 1960s were poorly built using untried methods and these have proved to be difficult and costly to maintain. Now if the residents in the Barbican are prepared to pay on top of enormously high rents (Arthur Scargill's rent was £34,000 a year), enormously high maintenance charges to keep in good order a building that looks like a high security prison, thats fine. But Local Authorities do not have the money to waste on vanity projects. Just because a building is designed by a pair of famous architects does not mean that they got it right in every buildig they designed nor that while it might have been right in 1960, it isnt in 2016. This unlovely block of 200 plus flats is built on a site that could potentially house 1500 families, families desparately in need of housing. What is the problem?

Lots of people think the Houses of Parliament are ugly. It depends on your view. How ugly is a plug?

£3 billion could pay for a lot of houses. Restoration and renewal even has its own website.

How do you know I am not being deadly serious about it?

At a different level I have always been uneasy about the elitist philosophy that lies behind brutalist architecture.

It stems from the post war planning that lay behind government plans to build a better Britain after 1945. Experts in every field laid out, not just what was good for the country but how people should live their lives. Decisions were made on the type of housing and houses and preferred tenure (renting) the country should have and vast areas of perfectly sound houses in inner cities were compulsorily purchased and demolished in order to build healthy sanitary high rise blocks. Most of the homeowners whose houses were compulsorily purchased did not get enough money for their homes to buy another house and were forced to apply for council accommodation and become tenants.

Why should a Local Authority want to restore an ugly building designed by a movement, whose philosophy was authoritarian and runs counter to the bottom up culture we claim to espouse today?

Beautiful and historic doesn't give people a home Well, some beautiful and historic houses have been turned into flats.
And we need some history and beauty in our lives too or else we all are diminished.

And if a new site were to be found for Parliament and it were to be re-built elsewhere, what would the cost be? Just look at how the costs escalated when the Scottish Parliament was built, and the Welsh Assembly costs were higher than anticipated. Added to that the demolition costs, the removal of all the materials, the building of new houses - the costs would start as too high and escalate to totally unaffordable by any body, private or public.

Exactly jalima although djen was talking 'tongue in cheek' with that suggestion.
I know you are not deadly serious about it ( as you ask) djen because I suppose you a sane person.

How do you know, roses?
The cost of refurbishment of Westminster Palace was £3 billion in 2012. That's probably gone up by a billion since then.
As Osborne wants devolution, why not devolve parliament and have mini ones in various parts of the country?

Back to rogue landlords;

www.theguardian.com/money/2015/nov/13/rogue-landlords-exploiting-deepening-housing-crisis

This is what the government does not care enough about to make it mandatory for rented houses to be fit for human habitation.
The fines are nowhere near enough. If every landlord could be fined the money they have taken in rent rather than have a maximum, perhaps the councils would be able to employ more people to inspect complaints.

Monica, Hull was the most damaged city in Britain during the second world war, with 95% of houses damaged.
I do not think that the council needed to knock down perfectly good houses to build high-rise.
What do you think the planners should have done after the war, to give people houses fit to live in?

They built a lot of prefabs, some of which are still lived in today (not sure what they did in Hull).

Jalima, not all buildings , you got rathe carried away with that list, but if I may give two examples, I would be devastated if Hampton court palace was demolished, Buck house is ugly, has little history and I couldn't care less if it was demolished , others may think it a beautiful building . We do not need to keep all the stately homes and the windsors housing arrangements are an insult to the millions in this country who need just two or three bedrooms.

Doubt this country will ever get past the - the privileged must always be protected.