Demolishing housing estates

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.

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.

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?

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?

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?

Beautiful and historic doesn't give people a home

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

The reason the other one is to be is because it has only 214 flats on a large site, and the council wants to build a lot more on the site
That's good then, as long as they are for the people vacating them and others who would not be able to pay £4 million!

I am another who is uneasy about listing buildings purely because of they wer considered to be revolutionary in their day. A case in point is Park Hill Flats in Sheffield. Built in the late fifties, early sixties to house those rendered homeless by the slum clearance programme, these brutalist "streets in the sky" concrete complexes were considered to be the very last word in social housing, and indeed the people who moved into them in the early days could not speak highly enough if them. By the mid to late seventies the council were finding it difficult to find people who wanted to live there and they rapidly became sink estates, with all the attendant problems. They stood all but empty for years, a crumbling eyesore and the first thing people saw when they came to the city centre either by car or by train. Most people favoured them being pulled down. Then in 1998, some bright spark decided to give them a grade II listing. One of the blocks has recently been renovated by a private company and the apartments are being offered for sale and private rent. As far as i can ascertain, there is no "affordable housing" included in the mix. The second unrenovated block remains all but empty and boarded up (i believe there are two tenants hanging on who either refuse to be, or cannot be, rehoused). I don't know what the plans are for this block (except that, given that it is now listed, it won't be pulled down) but it would be nice to think that, if and when it is renovated, at least a proportion of it would be for social rent. I'm not holding my breath though.

Well said M0nica

The Barbican Estate is not private, as stated in The Guardian article.

It's owned by The Corporation of London but was built post-war with the intention of attracting financial professionals back to The City after the war and rents were set at market prices. With the coming of Right to Buy many of the flats ended up in private ownership.

So basically it's a very posh council estate!

I love The Barbican and would live there given half the chance - it's in the ancient heart of London. The complex is more that the three towers - lots of other types of buildings too, plus the Barbican Theatre, Guildhall School of Music, etc.

The flats in Shakespeare tower, the middle and tallest of the three, are fantastic - large with wraparound balconies, huge rooms and flexible interiors. As I said earlier, nothing wrong with brutalist architecture, walkways, etc., all depends on who lives there and how the housing stock is maintained.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbican_Estate

I worked near the Barbican when the flats were built. I thought them hideous then and I haven't changed my mind. However, I would point out that the Barbican flats are high density and the cost of keeping the site in good order means service charges from £2,000 - £16,000 a year. Not many council tenants can afford service charges at that level

On the other hand the Robin Hood Gardens estate is low density and if over 1500 council dwellings can be built to replace under 250 then there is a good argument for doing that, particularly in an inner city area where sites for new homes are difficult to find. However, I rather suspect that many of the new homes would be for private sale, and that is a different thing altogether.

I get very uneasy when heritage groups get together to protect buildings because of who designed them and the fact that they were revolutionary when built. I say this, even though generally I admire the work of the architects involved, but the judgement of a building should be its fitness for purpose whether it is a block of flats, a school, or any other building.

The evidence is that the Robin Hood Gardens building are not fit for purpose and I can think of no good reason why council tenants should have to live in a decaying building that neither they nor their council can afford to maintain to please some architectural purists. If the residents of the Barbican are prepared to stump up to keep a very ugly development maintained regardless of cost let them.